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

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 »

Enterprise 2.0 experience: 5 misconceptions

Sometimes when participating in the launch of a brand new initiative, a disruptive one, you may feel a bit like the sorcerer’s apprentice and not too sure how to make things happen. Donning your wizards robe and hat, you go ahead with what seems to be the right things to do, while eager to see how others are doing, and learning from the early experiments. In the past week’s meetings I had with several companies moving into Enterprise 2.0, lessons learned were at the centre of the discussion: what, in the transformation effort, is different from originally expected?  Here are 5 misconceptions that came up in the discussions, all valid considerations.

Misconception 1. Enterprise 2.0 mimics Web 2.0
Because both the term and the concept ‘Enterprise 2.0′ was coined from ‘Web 2.0′, and because the technology behind both have the same roots (’cloud roots’ if I may), because the web outside inspired the enterprise inside, one can think it is just a transposition. Then comes the vision of a plethora of technical features, employees becoming geeks, or staying behind and dragging down the organization, anarchical deployment and use. It did happen to start-ups in early growth phases, but it doesn’t happen to enterprises, because we’re on a different paradigm: we’re  improving an ecosystem. From what I see from corporations who are running the transformation, it gets careful thinking and backing. Moving to Enterprise 2.0 does not change the enterprise’s culture, values and unique specificities, but helps reinforce them. Here are 3 examples on how each organization may get different results from deploying E2.0 within its own patterns: Accenture uses it to invigorate its practices, focus on sharing and exchanging information (and especially the ones they do create), the central pattern is a knowledge network; IBM fosters  innovation and collaboration, getting the employees around the world to unleash their creative thinking and leverage each other’s ideas, the central pattern is collaborative innovation; and Sogeti concentrates on teaming, on sharing and leveraging expertise and experience, the central pattern here is rather corporate efficiency.

Misconception 2. Enterprise 2.0 is a technology issue
As you may already imagine from the above argument, E2.0 is far more than just a technology issue, or the choice of the right technical solution. Technology is the engine: how you will use it is what gives it value - like for a car or a computer. E2.0 is in fact a broad corporate change issue, with dependencies on the corporate culture, a need to be consistent with the corporate strategy (or to update the corporate strategy to make the most of this new paradigm), and organizational impacts, since both hierarchical and transverse work streams will be impacted. It cannot be worked as a normal legacy systems transformation project: while most of the time the CIO is in charge, he must work with the rest of the organization and especially the executive team and HR to make the transformation successful.

Misconception 3. Employees need to be trained before being able to participate
While a minimal training is mandatory (technical: what is a forum, a blog, vs. email, a wiki, etc.; and non-technical: what is collaboration, what are communities, etc.), one can hardly learn and understand the new paradigm without diving into it. The momentum will not come from training at first, though it is indispensable during the transformation. It will come from a common expectation for the organization’s transformation. Remember Enterprise 2.0 is about network and collaboration, and apply the virtuous circle of situated learning: the more people participate, the more they learn, and the more they identify with the wider group, becoming more motivated to participate further.

Misconception 4. Let’s offer it ‘inside’, to prevent employees  joining it ‘outside’
You probably know this argument: what ever happen, people will join the Web 2.0 movement and go on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other Ning things, so let’s offer similar tools internally, so that employees are not tempted any more by the siren’s song. Capture energy, prevent leaks. This argument is still a main one for some solution vendors, while experience has shown that it somehow misleading. First, see Misconception 1, people won’t find ‘inside’ - the empowered enterprise’s ecosystem - what they look for when they go ‘outside’ - extra-curricular activities, communities of practice, etc.-. Both environments are complementary, rather than rivals. Second, having employees ‘fluent’ in 2.0 environments may be a plus - the more they practice, the more they become skilful, adept and efficient - see Misconception 3 - so it is good that they are also present on Web 2.0 platforms. Of course, the corporate policy might help them understand how to represent their company, what to do, what to avoid. And third, last but not least, no company even the biggest can survive isolated: customers, competitors, ideas, insights, research, inspiration… all these are ‘outside’. Being able to go and grub around in the world and fetch intelligence back is an asset.

Misconception 5. Participation should be encouraged by objectives (or rewards)
Because the modern corporation has sustained good results with the management by objectives mantra, one can be tempted to use that process to facilitate Enterprise 2.0 adoption.   This commonly shows as a false-good-idea, a potential ‘faux-pas’ that may turn the effort into a big flop. When deploying Enterprise 2.0 into the corporation, what we seek is adoption, which will result in new work behaviours, strengthen the ties, allow  pooling of  skills and expertise, bring new ideas to light, etc…; and indeed adoption is very sensible to any attempt of control. Short story: an internal community is opened around the subject of Customer Satisfaction. The management is truly interested in getting results, hence it wants its employees to participate, and thus, actively encourages employees’ involvement. Employees get this as a mandatory task that will be checked during year-end appraisal, and they step in the community to ‘please’ the management, rather than because they are interested in the subject or may bring insights to the discussion. At the end of the day, the volume of participants is important, but most contributions are limited to “I agree”, “That may be right” or “Good idea”, i.e. no value add, a waste of time for other members, plus a spiral of disinterest for the few people really engaged with this subject. Lesson learned: one must definitely seek other means to foster adoption, such as viral adoption, value added animation, situated learning, or collective immersion events.  Also, remember that between 1% and 20% of people usually actively participate in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, depending on the ‘centrality’ of the corporate culture and other factors, and forcing the participation may only get a negative result.

Thanks Didier C., Pierre M., Willem G. And Christian S. for sharing with me their corporate stories.

Written by Cécile Demailly change management, Enterprise 2.0 Enterprise 2.0, Management No Comments »

“Power to the edge” in the media too!

An old habit I kept from my Boston years is to listen to OnPoint Radio, which I enjoy very much. There is nothing comparable in France with such high level debates on the key topics of the moment.

The broadcast of November 19. , “Google vs. Murdoch”, is a great moment and definitely worth listening. Guests were:

• Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the Interactive Program at the City University of New York School of Journalism
• Michael Wolff, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and founder of the news aggregator Newser.com
• Steven Brill, media entrepreneur, founder of CourtTV, American Lawyer magazine, and co-founder of Journalism Online.

If you listen to this great 45mn show, you will hear a lot of interesting comments from professionals who strongly -and often violently- disagree on the business model for the news industry in the years to come. The equation seems impossible to solve: on the one hand, journalists must be paid for their work, and on the other hand, both the subscription and the advertising business models have been damaged by the internet and by Google, which completely changed the rules of the game, by spreading advertising revenues on a wider population of content publishers.

Notwithstanding the obvious need for cost cuts in this industry like in others, it brings a totally new perspective  on the value of information. What are we newspaper readers really willing to pay for? It looks as if there is a general consensus that protecting content through online subscription does not make much sense for general news, because readers do no value repackaged news that they can find elsewhere for free.  Protecting content by IP rights does not work either unless it can be considered as creative work, which is highly questionable for most news articles. Relying on donations is not a very comfortable business model either. So what’s left?

Service.

If our piece of breaking news is published milliseconds ahead of all others, this has value. If it comes from first hand sources that nobody but you can approach, this has value. If you embody a living link between your readers and first hand information sources, this has value. But if you come later on, or if you are several degrees of separation away from the unique source, you are just a commentator. If you are good at it, your readers will reward you by linking to you, thus increasing your reputation as an expert, and hopefully associated revenues too (advertising, keynote, lectures..), but you will not be paid for the news.

So it looks as if the value creation of the news industry is shifting away from the center - formal content producing empires sending reporters throughout the world - to the edge -  intelligence networks of thousands of people acting as sensors and producing content on the fly and relying on aggregators, search engines and of course people to enrich the information and take it to the people who need it.

Sounds familiar? If you’ve read  “Power to the Edge”, a must-read seminal book published in 2003 by the U.S. Department of Defense on information and organization management philosophy, it will ring a bell. And it is likely to be a wake-up call, too.

Written by Martin R. Dugage media newspapers Management No Comments »

Rypple : le 360° feed-back pour tous

Vous connaissez le 360° feed-back ? Il s’agit d’un processus d’évaluation des compétences piloté par l’entreprise à partir d’un référentiel de compétences défini par l’entreprise.  Cela peut servir pour détecter les hauts-potentiels ou pour évaluer les résultats sur le mode entretien annuel d’évaluation.

Rypple est un service proposant un système de feed-back auto-géré. Voici quelques textes extraits de leur site pour comprendre le système :

De quoi s’agit-il ?

“Rypple is built on the belief that feedback leads to success. Some of  the best habits of successful people are built into Rypple. What are they? Frequent requests for honest, direct feedback; quick, regular 1-on-1 conversations; and real actions based on this feedback that leads to constant improvement…and success!

People use Rypple to ask for specific feedback on business and personal topics from the people they know (co-workers, clients, mentors, and friends).

Companies use Rypple to enhance their existing performance reviews and learn where their people can improve.”

Comment ça fonctionne ?

“The basic building block is a ‘Rypple’, a 200-character question that you want answered, and that Rypple sends to the people you specify (your ‘advisers’), who could be colleagues, clients, mentors and friends that you know.

Advisers receive an email containing your question, and can respond how and when they want. We made it easy for them to respond through features like Reply by Email.

Rypple is designed to keep responses anonymous, so your advisers feel safe providing honest, direct feedback (which can sometimes be difficult).”

et en bonus une vidéo :

Introduction to Rypple

Les applications de ce service sont nombreuses : depuis le développement de sa performance professionnelle jusqu’au Personal Branding.

Quelques pistes de réflexion sur l’utilisation de Rypple pour un individu ou pour une entreprise :

- Sur le management de l’intelligence collective

L’évaluation d’une activité très intellectuelle (réflexion, partage de savoirs, création,…) est très difficile. Par exemple, sur quels critères évaluer ce que doit être le temps de rédaction d’un rapport XYZ ? Comment évaluer la qualité de ce rapport objectivement (sans que le contenu de l’évaluation varie trop fortement en fonction de la personnalité des évaluateurs) ? Face à ces questions, il semble que le système du 360° feed-back soit l’outil le plus adapté pour l’évaluation des activités à forte valeur ajoutée intellectuelle. Mais pour l’instant, on évalue de la même manière le traitement de 50 dossiers et la rédaction d’un rapport de 50 pages. Si compter jusqu’à 50 est à la portée de n’importe quel manager puisque c’est quantifiable, évaluer la qualité d’un rapport avec équité et objectivité est une tâche bien différente dans laquelle le collectif peut apporter une contribution intéressante.

Le 360° feed-back pose par ailleurs la question de l’évaluation de la contribution d’un collaborateur au collectif. On voit mal pourquoi un collaborateur contribuerait au collectif si on l’évalue uniquement sur ses objectifs individuels.

- Sur la gestion de sa marque personnelle (Personal Branding)

Ce mode d’évaluation joue un rôle important. Sur la partie  “Mieux vous connaître” de la démarche, il faut faire un travail d’introspection pour définir son identité professionnelle. Pour réussir cette partie, il est indispensable de solliciter le feed-back de son entourage social et professionnel. Il faut chercher de l’aide dans le collectif pour mesurer les différences entre notre perception de nous-mêmes et la perception des autres. Cette mesure est d’autant plus importante que la perception de la réalité par notre entourage est toujours plus forte que la réalité elle-même.

Sur la partie, ” Mieux vous faire connaître”, il est utile de recueillir du feed-back pour savoir si son profil, son blog et tous les éléments liées à sa marque personnelle sont ” on brand” ou “off brand”.

Est-ce que ce mode d’évaluation est humainement acceptable ?

Solliciter du feed-back est dangereux puisqu’on s’expose à un feed-back négatif et ce d’autant plus que Rypple permet l’anonymat. Quand une entreprise vous impose le 360° feed-back, vous jouez le jeu parce que vous ne voulez pas monter dans la prochaine charrette. Mais, si vous aviez le choix, est-ce que vous seriez l’initiateur d’une telle évaluation pour vous-même ? Est-ce qu’il n’est pas plus confortable de ne pas savoir ? de vivre dans l’illusion de la perfection ? de se protéger psychologiquement contre toute nouvelle agression extérieure (on doit déjà supporter celles qui ne sont pas sollicitées) ?

Rypple est promis à un grand avenir mais ce service n’est pas compatible avec toutes les personnalités. Il faut avoir un “self” fort, une grande confiance en soi, de l’ambition, l’envie de progresser pour devenir moteur de sa propre évaluation.

Sur la dimension marque personnelle, on pourrait aussi imaginer que ces feed-back servent à construire sa réputation professionnelle. Mais cela pose deux problèmes : (1) du fait de l’anonymat, on ne sait pas qui est l’auteur du feed-back. Or le poids d’un feed-back dépend de la réputation et du statut de la personne qui le donne ; (2) la réputation professionnelle se construit sur une logique de recommandation et non d’évaluation, il faudrait donc qu’on puisse publier uniquement les feed-back positifs.

Enfin, des dérives sont possibles. Les feed-back que je reçois sont ma propriété. Je les utilise pour progresser. Mais Rypple pourrait aller plus loin en permettant à l’entreprise d’utiliser ces feed-back comme un outil d’évaluation à 360°. Dans ce cas, il est fort probable que l’individu ne serait plus le moteur du système. On reviendra au top down, c’est-à-dire à un entretien annuel d’évaluation à la mode 360°. Rien de nouveau ! La force de Rypple aujourd’hui, c’est d’offrir un outil d’auto-évaluation pour ceux qui veulent progresser dans leur métier. Peut-il proposer le 2 en 1 sans perdre son âme ?

Merci à Dominique Turcq pour cette découverte et pour ses “feed-back” inspirants pour la rédaction de ce billet.

Written by Olivier Zara 360 feed-back, Rypple Enterprise 2.0, Management, Personal Branding No Comments »

Future features of Corporate Social Media. What’s next?

Technology has progressed so much that it has lost its power towards the users. Today users of Social Media and collaborative tools don’t have to follow the “rule” of a given technology. They can more and more decide what features they want and how they want them to work. This was already valid when mobile phone users decided that SMS was a key feature (telecom companies had not planned for SMS to be an important communication tool!). It is valid today when users of Twitters decide that retweeting is a major usage, etc. But there is more than these ways of using some existing features and making them a major pattern of usage. Today the users, especially in the corporate world, can dictate what they want or not and the technology has to follow. The dictatorship of the programmer’s thinking on how to use a tool is over.

WHICH NEXT MORPHING?

The SMS case and the retweet case mentioned above are just easy examples. The usage of many tools is morphing fast. Let’s mention a few. Calling someone on the phone for a simple question that could be solved by IM or SMS has become intrusive. Using mail inside Social Networks replaces the usage of “classic” mail tools (although not yet within corporations, will it come?). Blogs are progressively becoming an anchor point toward which microblogging is pointing (not yet within corporations). Physical meetings are switching to virtual meetings and it becomes slowly (organizationally) incorrect to convene physically a meeting that could have been hold virtually. A static profile becomes progressively unacceptable and “friends” want to be informed of the changes of profiles, preferences etc; of their “friends” via regular updates as on all Social Networks; will this soon apply within industrial organizations when the word “friend” is replaced by the word “colleague”? Tags are evolving from being tags used by the publisher to qualify documents to tags used by the users for searching not only relevant information but also communities. Etc. examples are plenty.

However, do the users really know that well what they want? (Many will recognize here a classic question for marketing people and a classic topic for those interested in the wisdom of crowds). Probably not yet but it is certainly something coming up.

It is not obvious that users can predict the next morphing, it is however certain that tools designers cannot. The question then becomes for the designers how to remain alert and ready to modify the tools according to the next morphing of social media usage within corporation?

Lets try to identify a few fields where questions are already arising for the usage of social media within corporations. Here are my two cents on the issue of “courtesy governance”, qualification of information and dashboard. This list is just indicative and a deeper one will be elaborated at the upcoming workshop of the Boostzone Institute on the new collaborative usages in corporations.

FOR A “COURTESY GOVERNANCE” of Push and Pull

One of the many issues with current social media is that the notions of Pull and Push are not clear for senders and for receivers. The tools are not clear. The usage could be ambiguous. Twitter is a good example of a push media (that can be at least a distraction, at worst a nuisance, at best a valuable source of information) that has become also a pull media and even a sort of search engine (the ultimate pull).

However the question is not only on the tool’s functionality but on the way it is used, on the power both receivers and senders have on choosing what they want to send and receive. It is probably impossible to create a formal governance (although a few organizations are trying) but it is certainly possible to develop a courtesy governance (remember the time where it was important to explain that capital letters in mail were shouting). A push media can become intrusive, and not only Twitter but even RSS are hard to monitor by the users. How can one receiver user select among the messages coming from a blog or a twitter user according to his priorities and interest as a receiver at a given point of time? Today most of tools are still on a O/1 format: either you get everything or you get nothing. Very few tools allow a confrontation of priorities and interest. Some do, like a phone call when the number is displayed: the caller says to the receiver that he wants to talk and considers it as urgent and important. But if the receiver has a different point of view he can just skip the call. The same happens with mail where one can open, or not, or delay the opening of a mail or even hide the sender definitively by pushing the spam button. But even these rudimentary measures do not exist easily on other social media and we all for example have to read the boring and uninteresting tweets of people, or their blogs on which we have put an RSS, just because we consider that from time to time they have interesting things to say. I personally subscribed to a number of people I am interested to follow because I consider them as having things to say, but I have recently cut the link because I discovered they also have many things to say on which I am not interested at all. My arbitrage was towards losing information rather than losing time.

One can expect future tools to help chose, in a simple way, how to configure and constantly reconfigure the alerts one gets. The simplicity is essential since the priorities one has on what one receives can change according to the moment, the sender and the topic.

QUALIFIYING INFORMATION

The qualification of information/publication will become a must. But it is easier said than done. What is a qualification? One can say at least that a message can be urgent/ important/ urgent and important/ neutral i.e. informational only. And this is still very simplistic since it does not even include the topic to which the piece of information is related or the public/confidential dimension, the sender’s importance for the receiver, etc. But, anyway, the most important is that the sender’s choice does not necessarily correspond to the receiver’s choice for the same information (and the problem is compounded when an information goes to several receivers, like with a blog or a tweet where multiple receivers will have multiple opinions on the qualification of an information).

The risk of creating frustration is large, especially for time conscious people (what most working people are and what all supervisors are) as the diagram below shows. The difference of perception on the relevance of an information can lead to distrust, frustration, even anger because of the time loss, and at the end can often harm the credibility of the sender.

WHICH DASHBOARD FOR TOMORROW?

How to plan for tomorrow? Probably by starting to develop “relevance dashboards”. In other words, like what is done today with search engines, future dashboards of information will have to get intelligent and to filter information according to the receiver needs and not only to the sender’s indications. It will have to be a better combination of automatic pull (please Mr. aggregator search constantly for that very specific type of information and bring it up, this feature is quite advanced today but still lacks flexibility), of filters on received push (please Mr. Aggregator separate the wheat from the chaff; this feature is clearly in infancy), of an intelligent filtering system able to identify quickly my time available, my current priorities, my current interests… (This feature is not yet here, but is it that far?).

Other issues corporate as users may want to see included as soon as possible are elements of the interfaces between internal social media platforms and public social networks. For instance for importing data from LinkedIn of a new employee. Also, for checking on groups, opened on external platforms like LinkedIn but in a way limited to a number of employees (e.g. project group X of corporate Y) in order to make sure that, when an employee leaves the company, his access to the external group is cancelled (a tough challenge as one can predict, but an essential one if one wants to reduce the governance challenge of external groups of employees).

We will discuss these issues and others around the topic of corporate user’s choice within a round table of users and tool designers at our next Workshop of the Boostzone Institute on the new collaborative usages in Paris on September 18^th. For those not having the opportunity to come, comments are welcome on this blog and a summary will be published here after the workshop.

Written by Dominique Turcq corporate social media, corporate tools, features, future Enterprise 2.0, Management, WOW world of work No Comments »