One of the key milestones for widely and successfully deploying collaboration in an organization is the process for choosing a new governance charter. Basically, in my experience, after some pilot communities and networks have helped identify why and how a specific organization should deploy a collaborative way (to innovate further; to increase individual productivity; to bring its internal culture to the level of its employer brand; and so on), people start thinking about some key issues like:
- what name should we choose for this initiative,
- what rules should we have to organize our collaboration,
- how should HR processes change to take into account this new dimension ?
As I currently conduct a world wide analysis of the World of Work, partially to put things in perspective (one loses it when staying too long in OECD countries) and partially to learn whatever I can. I wanted to share a few things that are not really new to me, but that I knew more intellectually than in practice. I had not been to India, Australia, to South Asia and South America for a few years and I really wanted to be surprised. I was. Here are jsut a few tidbits of my takes, more will come.
This keynote speech of John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, at MIT last October is to me one of the best presentations about Enterprise 2.0 that I ever came across. Though Chambers’ fast-paced southern drawl is sometimes hard to follow, his authority on this matter comes from practice, as opposed to many gurus who don’t run large companies. Cisco is undoubtedly a lab for E2.0, and Chamber is definitely in the pilot’s seat. His point about collaboration revolves around productivity and speed. My attention was drawn by a couple of things he said, such as the new ability of the company to pursue 26 top priority projects at the same time instead of just one or two last year; or the fact that Chambers meets more customers now but less often face-to-face and more often virtually, less often one-on-one and more often as a group; or the fact that he had to get rid of 20% of his staff composed of control freaks who didn’t get it. Chamber believes that communities are the very core of E2.0, and he admits that he had a hard time getting used to it. A great presentation, and worth one hour of listening. The questions from MIT students an scholars are not stupid either.
I am just about to leave for holydays, and was thinking about how 2008 is finishing. It actually started out pretty well for all of us engaged in “collaboration based change management” or “enterprise 2.0″ development. But then, there was the credit crunch.
Simply put, somehow along the way trust disappeared, and the whole system started contracting. It is still contracting.
The question is, why did trust disappear ? Too complex a question to adress in a post. In here, I would only say that we do not believe the economy can go on growing at what was its pace in the past few years. Or, more precisely, that it cannot continue growing if it keeps the same structure and governing principles.
Ce billet introduit la 3ème table ronde des sessions dédiées à l’Entreprise 2.0. Le thème abordé est comment le processus d’innovation est radicalement transformé par les usages participatifs et collaboratifs de l’Entreprise 2.0. La table ronde n’est pas encore complète, quelques noms restent à confirmer, mais vous pourrez en suivre l’évolution en consultant régulièrement ce billet dans les jours qui viennent.
