L'Institut Boostzone est un carrefour d'échanges construit autour des réseaux professionnels vivants et de ses implications sur le management

Manpower Inc.’s CEO in Davos on why Social Networks are important for CEOs

Manpower Inc. ’s CEO Jeff Joerres presented at Davos a paper on why social networks are important for CEOs of large companies for their management.
In itself this paper does not bring a lot of news to the members of the Boostzone Institute but its significance is somewhere else.
Thanks to this announcement it is not anymore only a privilege for the CEOs of large IT companies like Cisco or IBM to talk about social networks (and to foster their own business), it has become a real concern for all CEOs and Jeff Joerres demonstrates it here.

Press release

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 27, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX News Network/ — Jeff Joerres, Chairman and CEO of Manpower Inc. will contribute to a private session at the World Economic Forum today titled: Social Networks vs. the CEO - is the CEO Prepared? Below is an executive summary of research by Manpower Inc. and its subsidiary, Right Management, which provides the basis for those remarks. A full copy of the Manpower white paper: Social Networks vs. Management? Harness the Power of Social Media is now available at http://www.manpower.com/research/research.cfm.

“In a time of salary and bonus freezes, organizations that can harness social media to help employees feel truly connected to the organization, positive about their employer and therefore more supportive of measures to help ensure the survival of the business, will reap the benefits.” - Manpower Inc. Chairman and CEO Jeff Joerres.

Many well-known organizations are leveraging the connective power of social media to enhance employee engagement, productivity, collaboration, innovation and reputation. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning, Plaxo, Hi5 and Second Life let individuals connect, communicate and share information with revolutionary ease and power, yet there are many complexities yet to be explored:

No Social Media Policy for Three Fourths of Workers

Manpower Inc. data reveals that 75 percent of employees say their organizations do not have a formal policy regarding the use of social networking sites at work. Where a policy does exist, it may focus on risk management, rather than how organizations can make the most of social networking for the benefit of their employees and their business. This “wait and see” approach is of particular concern in today’s market in which there are high levels of discontent among employees which may drive attrition. Paradoxically, this movement in the labor market may not necessarily result in an availability of talent; there is still a mismatch between where talent is needed and where it’s located.

One Fourth of Workers are Updating Their Resumes

Employee discontent is borne out by the findings of a recent survey(1) by Manpower subsidiary Right Management, which revealed that many workers are unhappy with their present jobs; 60 percent intend to leave and an additional one in four are networking and updating their resumes. More than ever, employers must harness the power of social networks to manage their employer brand to help attract new candidates and keep existing employees aligned and engaged.

Nearly a Third of Workers Use Social Media to Research Job Culture

A subsequent survey(2) by Right Management confirmed that social networks are a place where workers go to assess prospective employees. 31 percent of respondents said they use social media to find out if prospective employers value and respect their employees. The growing use of these networks does raise challenges for reputation management for organizations and will likely require them to relinquish some control, but if organizations are prepared to embrace social media there can be considerable benefits. The survey also revealed that 30 percent of respondents use social media to find out about career development opportunities. This provides a great opportunity for organizations embracing social media, since career development was listed by 40 percent of respondents of an additional survey(3) to be the most important factor when considering a new employer.

Manpower Inc. recommends that companies consider taking the following steps to promote the constructive use of social networking:

• Challenge employees to innovate. Promote the positive use of social media by encouraging employees to come up with ways to use these tools to do their jobs better. People love to discuss their successes, so get employees to describe how they’ve used social media tools in new ways, for example, to generate leads or serve customers better. You can focus these efforts by function or interest, as needed. Follow the lead of so many innovative organizations and run a contest for the best new ideas.
• Tap internal experts. Teach by example by encouraging employees who regularly use social networking in their jobs to discuss and demonstrate how it’s done. Keep track of the new ideas that flow from this kind of mentoring exchange and share the ideas and best practices.
• Let employees “own” the governance. The foundation of any healthy social network is an engaged community. Let your employees help develop and enforce your company’s guidelines. This approach will certainly appeal to those employees most likely to use social media, promoting trust in the goals of the guidelines that ultimately are instituted.

The Savvy CEO Will Use Social Media to Inspire Contemporary Working

Social networks offer an important opportunity to build a winning organization. For the workforce at large, social media can help keep employees intellectually and emotionally engaged. Social networks are particularly suited for communications intended to keep employees connected to an organization’s mission and vision. The Manpower Paper: Social Networks vs. Management? Harness the Power of Social Media offers specific ways social media can help employees do their jobs better, including ways that it can boost productivity, encourage collaboration, manage knowledge, recruit workers and build a winning brand.

Written by Dominique Turcq Uncategorized No Comments »

The XXIst Century is becoming a teenager, are we too?

The name of the coming decade, between now and 2020, has not yet appeared on the screens of the “namemakers” and it may take a few years before it does.

However, one thing is certain, whatever else happens in this decade, and the best or the worst could (the last teenage decade, 1910-1920 was one of the worst in human history), this decade will be a major milestone in the way humanity gets connected. I would suggest to call this decade “Birth Of The Total Connect”. Individuals will connect to individuals without knowing them and with very little introduction ceremony; individuals will connect to several types of work in a complex mix of virtual and real interactions; individuals will connect to the most important database of knowledge mankind ever produced; equipments and machines will connect with their masters i.e. us (including our fridges or home air conditioners via the Internet); they will also connect with each other — without us knowing about it — when they will need a refill or maintenance or “just” when they will be used to collect, store and message data about us in a systematic way, the current private data usage by Google for advertising is just a joke versus what is coming next.

This total connect decade has started. We need to better understand how it will affect our networks, our standard of living, our professional and private lives, our relation to work and to colleagues; how the relationship between corporations and their connected employees all over the world, their suppliers etc. will change and to what shape of the world of work it will lead.

This total connect will be one of the many elements of the chaos theory put in practice. The butterfly effect will show its reality within this decade and it will be true in fields as diverse as climate change, social networks, geopolitical issues, finance, migrations, human health, etc. A twitter stream could lead to the fall of a government, a rumor could ruin a corporate reputation, an other one an individual’s standing, etc.

The problem with total connect is that it connects to, both, the good and the bad, the truth and the rumor, the scientific database and the hoax. Yes, these are also the problems of teenagers who have to learn to discern and it is not easy for them.

What will be most needed for this decade is a “common” sense for managing our “commons” (what belongs to all of us in a way or another and for which we are responsible) in what is now clearly an unavoidable world of “commun”ities.

I wish us all a good teenager decade, the opportunity to become adults, to separate the wheat from the shaft, to become better actors of our world, to understand that it is changing faster than we can grasp, that all what we learned and considered right might be wrong within a fortnight.

It already happened, it was called the century of the lights, the Renaissance.

Our world is changing, let’s enjoy and be responsible.

Written by Dominique Turcq future edito No Comments »

de l’huile dans les rouages de la collaboration

La collaboration en entreprise n’est ni naturelle, ni habituellement amusante, ni spontanée. Comment utiliser l’art et le “fun” pour la dynamiser?
Au cours d’un atelier de travail nous avons étudié les méthodes employées chez Danone ainsi que les techniques de créativité -inspirées du monde artistique- du cabinet Innovia.

Vous trouverez dans ce film un aperçu de la networking attitude avec la mise en place de market places de bonnes pratiques qui “sérieuses dans le fond et enjouées dans la forme” mettent à jour de véritables filons de compétences à l’intérieur de la société.  Parfaitement complémentaire, la démarche des expéditions “mind opener” permet aux salariés de découvrir les points d’excellence d’autres organisations.

Le lien ci après reprend la présentation sur la méthode Créativart d’innovia: les artistes détectent les signaux faibles, métissent les cultures, voient les choses sous un angle original… En ce sens ils peuvent nous inspirer pour “booster” la créativité:

La présentation de la méthode Creativart développée par innovia

Nous remercions vivement nos invités pour le partage de ces informations et pour leur présentation enrichie en couleur et bonne humeur:

Benedikt Benenatti, Directeur  des  événements et de l’animation du réseau de communication interne  chez  Danone
Isabelle Napolitano d’Innovia
Nicolas Rolland, Directeur du Développement des Organisations chez Danone

Written by Maryline Gerlach Uncategorized No Comments »

Managerialism, an old battle with many similarities with Network Centric Management today

You should read this article “Managerialism and the demise of the Big Three”

by Robert R Locke [Emeritus, University of Hawaii, USA and a specialist of the history of management sciences]. It was published in December 2009 in the real-world economics review, issue no. 51.

This article is relatively long and difficult to read. Too bad if you only read one screen page articles, you will miss it. Now; if you are interested in the history of management and in what kind of lessons history tells us today, it is a jewel.

Robert Locke has been writing extensively on management practices, namely comparing the US and Japanese management systems. This article summarizes his view on why the Big Three lost their battle against the Japanese because they were unable to apply the Japanese rigorous but specific production management techniques.

One of the main reasons is what Robert calls (and denounces) managerialism, i.e. the management by the hierarchy, and in particular by the class of “managers”, as opposed to the collective and community like management of Japanese companies. Now you know why I see this article as a jewel! A striking parallel can be done today with what will happen to those companies that will be able to switch to a more collaborative management and those who will stay with a hierarchical one.

When you read this article just put your brain in a parallel processing mode and while you read about the American and the Japanese organizations in the manufacturing industry, just think of the contemporary challenge we are facing if we accept that networks will drastically change our management models. You will see why the emergence of the multidivisional firm actually led to the possibility of managing large groups but also to the hubris of a few managers who saw their coordination role as the real core value of the group. I let you get glimpses of the analogies.

Locke insists on an old concept incredibly contemporary: the one of a culture of flows versus a culture of structures as elements of management (see page 31 32), an important point because today’s organization has to become nothing else than a series of flows and connections. It has to include some regulation and governance (as with the commons or as in any system with collective responsibilities) for these flows but this is exactly where managerialism failed and where the old hierarchical management might fail in the face of Network Centric Management.

He also looks at how change is made more complex when one cannot reduce the people’ status differences within the Firm, something not really new but so acute within communities (see page 36). New hierarchies have to appear, but they will be based on the quality of contribution and on the quality of individual’s skills, not on status nor on the quantity of contribution. Quality is at the core, as it was in quality management.

He also looks, among other examples, on how the cooperative behavior between suppliers and producers led to better cars (page 39) instead of a client/supplier relationship.

He reminds us that already in the early 70s (page 40 41) there was a very interesting conceptual movement towards considering successful organizations as those able to organize themselves like a natural living system with three basic principles: self organization, interdependence, diversity.

What I like in Locke’s approach, beside the fact that I have been working on these issues since the time of my thesis on Japanese Management, is that he reminds us of the necessity of the tools required for a successful collaboration. And the tools recalled here are not technologies, they are the very tools around the organization of work, see page 42 43, from Quality Control Circles to Takt time to Kanban, to JIT, etc. All these techniques were at the heart of the Japanese success. I think that we don’t have them all yet for Network Centric Management within the corporation even if we are approaching some of them (governance rules, moderation techniques, virtual/real interaction for problem solving, etc.)

The most striking exhibit in this article is the following one. Just replace TPS (Toyota Production System) with Network Centric Management and you will be surprised too. History really has lessons for us.

I let the conclusion of this post to Robert:” Was this management? Not in the Chandlerian sense or in the sense understood by purveyors of the “New Paradigm” in management education. But Management by Means produced much better results.”

Written by Dominique Turcq locke, managerialism, NCM Enterprise 2.0, Management, Uncategorized, WOW world of work No Comments »

Crises and Innovation: intuition, imagination and networking

Terrible to say but a crisis has a positive side to it; you must have heard about the Chinese word for crisis: written with two separate kanji that mean risk and opportunity.  Thus, the crisis is here to tell us that we need to take risks and opportunities shall arise as a result!

From stalling to moving ahead:

1. our economic environment is rethinking its paradigm… surprisingly human-centred,
2. the companies are rethinking their strategy… through network-centric management,
3. we are all rethinking our social ties… through family and neighbourhood solidarity.

None can deny that we have moved forward in a big way in the past few years, despite the terrible financial demise we are facing; if, on one hand, we seem to have gone individually, the reality is something else: we have garnered our systems with networking tools galore… So, what do we do with these, exchange titbits of information or vacation pictures? Much more conducive to humanity’s progress (from the Latin progressus which means: moving forward), let’s plan innovation through idea generation, shared knowledge, and team work.  Yes, innovation is not the private foray of State-run programs or Enterprise R&D’s!

The other day, as I was planning to design my new abode, someone, at a distance, asked that I describe the space so that he could get a feel; I could have taken pictures, assembled them in a way that made sense to my correspondent.  Yet, as a matter of innovation, I thought of an architect software to try out mapping the place; to my biggest surprise, I searched on the net and, within seconds, was scrambling with the floor planner; hours later, I came out with what turned out to be a magical 3D design of my place with mezzanine floors appearing as in reality.  I promise that I did not take any architect lessons in the past; it was just intuitive!

Intuition plays a big role in the current technology world and this is what allows anyone to quickly master any advance.  Have you seen how simple it is to use the most recent digital camera; if you remember the complexity of old photographic equipment, you can be amazed at how elaborate your pictures are today, whilst mastering complex technology functions.  It is the same with anything that you do today: see how simple your world has become if you accept the unconventional of going at things; kids, age 7, are better at most tools than us!

Imagination has developed tremendously as it is the power of bringing images and vision together; with the net as a base, it is so simple to go and get these sources of inspiration that shall lead to the next innovation.  Ok, you may not be the greatest inventor in the world, like Archimedes shouting Eureka when he discovered the water push on the body… in his bath!  But, no reason to feel guilty if you have used all information available to get where you want to go; that is what the net is all about.  More than that, it is also networking!

Networking when you hear what happened with this competition to curing AIDS, the fights between the American and French teams, come on!  How about cooperation rather than competition: is this world just about honours and money?  Granted, it feels good to be recognized but networking can save us time and is not time “money”, in a way?  Advantage, fast assembly through modular design in innovation; share a document on any data base and each can add to the idea.  When will companies realize the power of shared innovation?

Let intuition guide you, let imagination feed you, let networking kindle you: that is innovation in and of itself; if you give yourself, and your network, credit for progress, we will altogether go far ahead in our new paradigm.  Happy New Year to all and let’s innovate together in 2010.

Written by Martin de Waziers Uncategorized No Comments »