“The Cultural Imperative For A Social Business”

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Steve Mays

That’s the title of a blog post by Maria Ogneva that has been stuck in my head for a week or so. It’s about how businesses and organizations communicate and share information. A topic of discussion in our company recently. Here are a few of my take-away’s from Maria’s post:

“Transparency and openness require the braveness of “opening up the kimono”, not when convenient, but all the time. It involves letting people know what’s happening and why, with advance notice, providing a channel to share feedback, and closing the feedback loop – in the open.”

I give us a B- on that one. We’d like to be there but aren’t quite.

“Knowledge hoarding is replaced by sharing. Traditionally, our educational systems have emphasized becoming a specialist. We have hoarded our knowledge in fear that if we shared what we knew, we will become more replaceable.”

Ouch. Been guilty of that myself. I suspect we still have pockets but by the very nature of hoarding, it’s difficult to know.

“Command and control mindset: Traditionally, corporations have been structured with tightly managed controls at the top, which were passed down through levels of management, down to the people who actually performed the work. Tasks to be done, as well as the processes by which these tasks had to be done, were mandated from the top.”

The C&C manager often has an “I-know-best-that’s-why-I’m-the-manager” mindset. Takes a lot of self-confidence to break free of this approach. But the command and control style of management be less and less effective in any event:

“Rigid hierarchies: Scarcity of information pre-Internet, combined with specialization, has contributed to knowledge hoarding. At times, this asymmetry of information, and not the right leadership skills, allowed people to rise up the corporate ladder. Hierarchies were developed to preserve this status quo. However, things are changing rapidly, and democratization of information is definitely putting the emphasis back on leadership style, and not access to information, as a competitive advantage.”

This is why I’m all in on the Network and shared information. It’s breaking down these 20th century approaches to business, communication and everything else.

If you manage a company or work at a company, you should take a few minutes to read this insightful post. I’ll let you know how things come out at our company.

Techies and Taciturns

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Steve Mays

Olivar Marks blogs about collaboration for ZDNet. He brings up an issue that I’ve been dealing with as I push for an enterprise social networking platform (Yammer) at our company.

“There seems to be a personality type that has a huge appetite for learning and using ever more frequent waves of new technology developments that is independent of any particular demographic, and who are eager to participate in group activities online or off.”

“These folks are often called “early adopters” and “techies” in companies and are leveraged in pilot try outs of new technologies. Their opposite –I call them the Taciturns (habitually reserved and uncommunicative)– are those who have limited interest (or competence and confidence) in collaborating, preferring instead to work solo and communicate on their own terms.”

Okay, I’m squarely in the first group. To the point of being annoying.

“Obviously some of the people who have created the workflows and body of knowledge inside a company through years of service resent the trivialization of their old fashioned ways of working, and some have been led to believe that they need to buck up their ideas and get with it on Twitter, micro/macro blogging, Facebook-in-the-enterprise and other forms of social engagement with their cohorts.”

…and I helped create some of those workflows and bodies of knowledge during the last quarter century but it’s time for some of them to go!

“The Taciturns of all ages generally speaking are laughing inwardly at all the teenage leadership stuff they hear being bandied about, and have often already decided they won’t be participating in any of that.”

What most managers -in my experience- really want is for every employee to immediately open, read and act on every email “from the top.” The notion of a social networking platform is less appealing because they now have to compete for attention with stuff (they consider) less important than theirs (usually everything).

“The Viral Me”

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Steve Mays

In The Viral Me (GQ), Devin Friedman heads to Silicon Valley for a closer look at social networking. Don’t let the length of this piece scare you off, it’s worth the read. A few of my favorite ideas:

“Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world.”
—
“I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff (social media) to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.”
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“(Silicon Valley) might be the last place in America where people are this optimistic. The last place in America where people aren’t longing for a vague past when we were the shit.”
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“Flood the social layer with information you want out there about yourself.”

“If you’re confused by the term social layer, think of the word layer as meaning “lens.” The social layer is one lens you can look through to see the content of the Internet. Who you’re connected to, what they’re connected to, what they like and don’t like.”
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“More and more people are going to have careers where they move from one thing to another fairly publicly. And what people are really investing in is your track record. Your brand. What you do and what you say and what you think are just as important as your skills.”
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“An open society isn’t one where people have access to the real you. It is simply providing access to the identity you very carefully construct for human consumption.”
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“I believe that more people are going to work for themselves, and more people are going to do what they’re passionate about. … What we’re talking about is monetizing passion. Monetizing authority.”

I can’t wait for people my age to get the fuck out of the way. Die, retire, whatever. Admit that you don’t get it and probably won’t get and make room for the bright young men and women who live the ideas expressed in this article.