Winning by Sharing

Is your network black or white?

"Mapped out on the screen, the story became clear: The medical community was actually divided into two sub-networks split apparently by ethnicity, with one sub-network dominated by physicians with mostly Asian names and the other with mostly European names. Connecting the two, like a spider suspended on a thread between two webs, was the dot for Physician No. 184 - a doctor the company's marketing department and salespeople barely knew".  Interesting study on the value of social networks and why Super Connectors are so important.

A summary of fractional work at the Tory party conference

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to actually speak about the rise of fractional work at the Tory Party conference on the opening day yesterday.  They outsourced the logistics of security passes to Fingerprint events.  Even though they acknowledge receipt of my application, passport and photo id my pass still wasn't ready. After taking two more photos of me at 7am in the morning, the police checking/validating id told me that due to my country of birth, extra checks have to be carried out.  Nice.  It was a Tory MP who invited me to talk there!  I got a text message saying it was ready at 10am, two hours after the speaking slot.  Thanks for that.

Fractional Work

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

The good news is that my hosts at JobsGoPublic and Career4Me presented on my behalf.  But here is the point I wanted to make.

The recent announcement by the Conservative Party's plans to cut the benefits of people on incapacity benefits is in some respects laudable because there are no doubt (statistically) some cheats, slackers and chancers on the list of 2.6m claimants.  But why such an emphasis on the supply side of the jobs equation? What's being done on the demand side, you know, to actually create work.  This presentation argues for the economic stimulus of an emerging form of work that has the potential to become the most dominant form of work within a generation.

As an aside, one of things that strikes me with all the political coverage right now on the EU is that politicians never, ever question the validity of their underlying organisational models.  In other words, it isn’t about ‘Broken Britain’ it’s about ‘broken system’.  Companies and governments won’t survive in their present form without decentralising some or all of their decision making.  But we can't go there can we?

How public companies are killing their own employees

Once again Leslie Thatcher picks out the best writings in the French press on subjects we just can't talk about here in the UK.  Patrick Apel-Muller writes in L'Humanité about the cause of employee suicides at France Telecom.

It was to take 21 employee suicides from February 2008 before the management of France Télécom would agree to assess the full scale of the dramas that play out within its walls. Now management mentions "prevention of psycho-social risks."

I've long argued that command and control organisation is actually killing people.  Research by the UK Work Foundation reached this conclusion several years ago when it found that the biggest contributor to the 2.7m people on incapacity benefits was workplace stress brought about by the oppressive nature of the traditional nature of the firm, which basically doesn't scale without the wholesale destruction of the workforce's self-worth and self-esteem leading to what is now referred to as 'work rage'.

I was working in Bangalore with Tesco a few years ago. I remember having conversations with successful upwardly mobile young Indian technologists about new houses, cars, holidays.  I pointed out that what comes with all this prosperity is the slew of western ailments associated with the export of capitalism’s model of organisation – diabetes, stress, obesity, jealously, distrust, rapacious greed and so on. They just laughed at me. This was published last week;

India outsourcing workers stressed to the limit. From obesity to sleep disorders – a healthcare crisis in the making?

....be careful what you wish for.....Patrick's article goes on to say;

It's the work itself that is sick because aspirations to self-realisation are denied and dignity often manhandled.

Among the messes and the waste capitalism brings about, human sufferings are not the least and they always accompany the destruction of the labor resource. How many broken hopes, wrecked feelings of self-worth are provoked by the precariousness of employment to which a majority of young employees are now compelled! The first steps into adult life become an obstacle course that goes on and on ...

Read the whole thing.

I'll be speaking at Africa Gathering about the dangers of the wholesale adoption of western organisational models.  More on this soon.

The case for social media inside the company

Are customers suffering from ‘Work Rage’?  This phenomenon hit the news as far back as 2001 when Gallup surveyed 1.4 million workers via 100,000 divisions in North America and Europe they discovered that 17% found work satisfying, 63% were not committed and actively looking elsewhere
20% were disenchanted, disaffected and often militant in expressing dissatisfaction.  Also reported at this time, 80% of men and 71% of women are unhappy with the number of hours they work (source: Economic and Social Research Council, 2001) and 72% of managers are criticised by family and friends for overwork. (source: Institute of Management).  All this resulting in a one in five chance of a customer interacting with a disaffected employee, and crucially, the loss of a valuable customer relationship.

A few years later the UK Work Foundation conducted an applied research programme with Sainsbury’s to discover the impact on P&L of a highly satisfied employee work force.  It focused almost exclusively on customer facing employees in the store and in contact centres.  The research unequivocally demonstrated a bottom line impact in profit terms to a business with ‘happy’ employees. 

In both these scenarios, there’s a common thread around the value of interactions, of customer interactions, of relationships formed, or what our accountants define as relationship capital or intangible assets.  These assets contribute as much as 70% to the share price of a company and yet there is no widely accepted way of measuring them.  A prolific amount of academic research is being done in this area, partly driven by mandates in the US Sarbannes-Oxley Act, created to er, prevent collapses like Enron and Andersens from happening again.  Interestingly, post mortems following Enron et al revealed ‘chatter’ in online groups predicted the collapses as far back as two years before with stunning accuracy of the people and companies involved.  What is the value of these intangible assets (‘markets are conversations’) given the cost of the company collapses to people’s individual wealth and careers?

Social media is most transformative when deployed inside the company and the implications of its use are far reaching because it creates network centric forms of self-organisation.  The financial savings derived from the removal of ‘organisation and management overhead’ are extraordinary. People forget that Google, Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo could not exist without Open Source software. Open Source software has been made possible because contributors are peers arranged   as a ‘flat’ democratised self-organising, self-directed network.   The single biggest story in 21st century ‘industry’ is the tectonic shift from command-and-control to peer-to-peer forms of production and collaboration which by definition, changes the very nature of capitalism.  Actually, to collaborative capitalism, but that’s another story. 

The tension that exists between these two models will continue for many years with a great deal of resistance from the incumbents for whom this kind of change is a step too far.  But globalisation between individuals rather than companies and nation states is unstoppable and some people will need to be dragged kicking and screaming; "The traditional theory of the firm is about the unitary, rational actor that more or less controls all the pieces of the puzzle that it needs in order to produce its outputs. Today global companies are a part of a huge set of interlinked networks across the planet.” Paul Kleindorfer, Director, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, Wharton Business School.  In other words, value is being created by any means necessary, no longer dictated by organisational relations and boundaries.

It should be obvious by now to most people that social software changes people’s behaviour.  Most large companies try to mould employee behaviour in a wide variety of ways all of which try to raise productivity levels because higher productivity means more profit right?   With some intelligent, authentic approaches, companies can develop and design new ways of working, new models of work that massively raise levels of productivity by making layers of management surplus and irrelevant and at the same time, removing the primary cause of workplace stress. By enriching the employee experience with imaginative social media platforms, interactions and relationship capital can be measured, customers get the benefits of employees’ new levels of energy and enthusiasm, and the bottom line impact on P&L is dramatic.

I was told a story about BT’s response to an earthquake in Pakistan a few years ago.  There was a mission critical need to restore telecommunication transmitters that served both business and government in the entire region.  There was no time to implement formal project management disciplines.  A leader was appointed and given carte blanche permission to select the resources needed and manage an open ended budget.  This leader built a network of expert volunteers from around the company, devolved decision making right to the edges of the project and gave groups of people permission to make decisions ordinarily made by weekly steering meetings.  BT in effect, adopted a network model of project organisation and delivery, a peer-to-peer model of working.  It was at that time, BT’s most successful project in every department; under budget, delivered early, few errors, no re-work, operationally stable.  After this, BT were quite happy to continue with prevailing project management practices; over-budget, late delivery, scope creep, and so on.  Why does it take a crisis to perform this well, and is it possible to make this way of working the norm?

Well consider this.  “The future of a company depends less on the nature of it issues, and more on its capacity to invent social structures able to solve them”, Jean Francois Nobel. The adoption of social media in the workplace is of such strategic importance that it must start with discussions about behaviours and models of trust and end with debates about software and platforms.  That’s the point.

Are you a loyal rebel?

Young people are now coaching online gaming fanatics to get them through difficult stages in the game.  They earn a living wage from it.  Other gamers derive an income from selling codes that unlock new game levels on eBay . Women still in their teens with huge followings on Twitter and MySpace earn six figure fees from cosmetic brands to influence their followers.  This work is frequently fractional in nature and so allows people to blend work with their passions, creativity and interests.  YouTube (owned by Google) has applied for terrestrial broadcasting licences in its major markets.  What opportunities does this create for our young people?  There should be little doubt in most people’s mind, that a tectonic shift in the nature of work has occurred, even though it is apparently ‘unevenly spread’.

Young people sense the internet has caused a fundamental change in their attitude towards work and the realisation that a 'career' has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. They now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude - an attitude that everyone is going to need.  We are not preparing our children for this kind of work.  We do not teach them;

•    How to collaborate
•    How to communicate
•    How to network
•    How to thrive on portfolio work
•    How to create sustainable, ethical wealth

It is hardly surprising that Facebook, Twitter, Google and MySpace were created in the US.  We simply don’t teach our young people “to have a healthy disrespect for the impossible”.

The Olympic Legacy – a 21st Century Guild

The most consummate networker of our time recently said;

“If you want to set something in motion on this planet, you need access to people you haven’t met. You need knowledge and information that is not yet at your disposal. You need ideas. You can always get them somewhere. From people.”  Martijn Aslander, Loyal Rebels

The internet and more specifically social software is enabling peer-to-peer connectivity on a breathtaking scale.  This is, historically speaking, a completely new phenomenon. One that’s easily as significant as the invention of the printing press in terms of its societal impact, velocity and rate of adoption.  

Social networks are communities of people who share the same cause, situation, or vocation. They facilitate professional exchange, allow members to establish a bond of common experiences and challenges online, and build networks of relationships which are leveraged offline. 

Research pioneered in the 1970’s by Etienne Wenger on what he called ‘communities of practice’ concluded that “learning is an inherently social process and that it cannot be separated from the social context in which it happens”.

These are in effect, early stage 21st century guilds.  There is an opportunity for the LDA to create a modern day guild that equips young people with the skills to thrive in the networked economy.  Social software means it’s possible to;

•    Provide a teacher for every student, on every subject, on a one to one basis and ‘on demand’
•    Enable the wider local community to contribute to student learning (“it takes a whole village”)
•    Make every component of the guild qualification a practical, real life project, that shifts mindset   from ‘job’ to wealth creation

There is a case for creating a platform that goes beyond online forums and ‘talking shops’.  By re-purposing social software used by existing global business communities, students can be provided with the freedom to organize themselves so that their practical projects can be realised with the help and support of their local communities. 

Members of this community will be drawn from the local business/social ecosystem to create a diverse population of people committed to coaching, mentoring and transferring their knowledge to students as an integral part of the qualification process.  The social, collaborative and communications skills acquired alone will satisfy employers increasingly vocal demand for these skills sets.  This will prepare the country’s Loyal Rebels for a wide range of models of work, provide them with the support networks that are now an essential aspect of achieving personal work/life balance aspirations, and more importantly, make them more ‘employer ready’.

Next Generation Leadership

role of network hub leader
Originally uploaded by ixtlan

The first draft of this diagram dates back to 2005 after I was asked by a recruitment firm to describe my ideal job.

This diagram is some work in progress on the evolution of HR to a situation when most of their time and effort is spent on enabling and managing conversations with stakeholders and employees. The big story here is that next generation leaders (that is, CEOs) will be those that are responsible for people connectivity such that their activities have direct measurable, dare I say it, "bottom line" benefits. Much more on this later.

A model for self-funding health care

THE BIG PICTURE, HISTORY, CONTEXT

We propose that it is economically viable for the UK's National Health Service (NHS) to become a self-funding entity by selling patient healthcare data to a wide variety of industry actors.  We also propose that an individual’s healthcare data record itself can eventually becoming an earning asset that can be passed on to future generations. 

In 2004, Jeff Kelley, an American Organisational Development expert working with Freddie McMahon, a UK Knowledge Software expert ‘discovered’ a means of capturing patient behaviour and preference data that is of sufficient value  for pharmaceutical companies, insurers and healthcare providers to actually pay for.  

They collaborated with IBM, Google and the UK Work Foundation who contributed to, and verified an economic model that could make any large scale healthcare system self-funding.  The author was involved in early discussions in the context of using social networks as a platform for testing and piloting the model.  Jeff Kelley died and his work was never published.

THE ECONOMICS – ‘HEALTHWEALTH’

What is the data? Think of a patient record as more than a static file or electronic representation of doctors’ notes. Think of it extending to DNA fingerprints, Tesco Clubcard data, medication consumption data (using RFID tagging), exercise data, and most valuably, self-service diagnosis data because it can be gathered in real time.  This data, aggregated at scale, provides answers to questions like;

• How many more type 2 diabetics are there?
• If I know the rate at which people are taking up no-smoking treatment should I really launch this new cigarette brand?
• Exactly how many heart drugs should I buy this year?
• Are we over-prescribing antibiotics in children, and by how much?

In fact the combinations of data are almost infinite, as are the questions.  What this data really does is allow companies to sense demand, predict and change user behaviour, and they will pay more for this than they do for conventional  market data.  Enough for the NHS to eventually become completely self-funding.

Both Microsoft and Google have introduced online services aimed at consumers who want to maintain their healthcare data in exchange for a range of benefits.  Neither of these initiatives has been successful in terms of scale and economics.  Their failure has been largely through lack of trust.

To illustrate the value of consumer data consider this; all the current academic research on large data sets provided by the major social media providers concludes that advertising is not a sustainable revenue model.  The reason why Facebook, Bebo (prior to acquisition) and Twitter are free is because they are VC backed, and even YouTube (owned by Google) has applied for broadcast TV rights in its major markets because online ads aren’t generating enough revenue. 

 Recently both Twitter and Facebook announced the development of what  they call ‘sentiment engines’ signalling a radical shift in their business model.  Sentiment engines are web services for anyone who wants to extract intelligence from the conversational content of huge numbers of consumers – for a fee. Big companies already have huge budgets for customer insight systems (CRM) and ‘social data’ is just another form of this data.  In the next 2 years, between them Facebook and Twitter will hold more valuable (that is, saleable) data about UK citizens than the government itself. 

The UK government would have to pay US software companies run by teenagers to test the impact on people of consuming these items: how many burgers is too many? How many beers? How many late night films? How much violence on a video game? How much cough medicine?

NEW MODELS OF ORGANISATION

Some upside-down thinking is needed to create a model of trust such that 60m citizens’ healthcare (anonymised) data can be monetized in a way where there is a continuous exchange of value for all parties.  The answer lies in organisational form.  

Perversely the clues can be found in financial services.  Visa’s organisational model created a network of 22,000 banks, 1 billion card holders, and 16 million merchants, generating $2.4 trillion of transactions at its peak.  Only 0.2% of that value was required to operate the Visa platform making it one of the most profitable businesses of all time.  The fact is, traditional command and control organisation is not suited to 21st century value creation models.  Dee Hock, the founder of Visa created a non-stock, for-profit membership based network with ownership in the form of non-transferable rights of participation. He designed the organisation according to his philosophy: highly decentralized and highly collaborative.

If the participants own the service, have full control and responsibility for the veracity and quality of their data and are able to democratically agree upon how this ‘Health Wealth’ is distributed, then people will trust it.  Jeff Kelley suggested the creation of a Public Interest Enterprise based on Open Source models of value exchange and ownership – “The power of us”.  Given that healthcare models in the US and Britain are only 10-20 years away from collapse we’re going to have to bet more heavily on the future, than we do on the past.  Indeed, such is the value of the nation’s collective health data, that it’s a future national asset, and of major strategic importance to the United Kingdom.

Think about this.  If a patient can derive an income from their medical data, even if it means re-keying it into another platform, they will.  All the indications are that Microsoft, Google and a number of ‘up starts’ are creating these platforms. 

In December 2007, 23AndMe launched an online service that enables consumers to understand their own genetic information by sending a mouth swab sample for genome mapping. Users know whether their children are predisposed to certain traits or talents — athletics or music or languages — and encourage them to pursue certain paths. “We will, counter intuitively, face even more pressure to conduct our lives carefully, strictly, and cautiously; we'll practice the art of predictive diagnosis and receive a demanding roster of things to avoid, things to do, and treatments to receive — long before there's any physical evidence of disease”.   In other words, this service is creating the very behaviour change in patients that governments seek. Google has invested in 23andMe, whose co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Last year a major step towards the widespread use of intelligent ‘web agents’ was made when researchers in New York, created a character in the virtual world of Second Life with the reasoning abilities of a child.  These web agents are commonly referred to as Chatterbots. The Wikipedia definition;

“A chatterbot (or chatbot) is a type of conversational agent, a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods.”

It is now possible for non-technical subject matter experts to program chatterbots (instead of a computer programmer).  So a nurse on the frontline who carries out diabetic screening diagnostics on patients can ‘embed’ her knowledge of clinical procedures in a chatterbot that can be used on the web, interactive TV or mobile phone by any consumer or professional wishing to test themselves or a patient for type 2 diabetes.  What would the cost base of NHS Direct look like if most of its conversations with callers could be handled by chatterbots?  £75 per hour for a GP, £28/hr for a practice nurse.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Last year, a group of experts in London carried out an analysis of the potential market for chatterbots based on Gartner research.  This research predicts that by 2011, 80% of internet users will have virtual representations of themselves - working or playing online.  User-generated scripts will power their chatterbots, enabling conversations with people within their social network or beyond.  Dialogue can be text or voice-based, covering any subject from informal socialisation to advice; people will  have a Chatterbot as a personal assistant within FaceBook, another as virtual tax advisor and a third specialising in the investor implications of doing business in Shanghai.  The group projected that based on these conservative assumptions;

• World population 7.2bn
• PC & mobile devices converged
• $100 PC pervasive
• Smart consumer devices i.e. health
• 4bn connected consumers  
• 2.2 chatterbots per consumer
• 1bn users with multiple devices
• 0.5bn organisations (incl. micro)
• 8.8 chatterbots per organisation

..by 2018 there will be.

13.2bn chatterbots
Chatterbot = Social Network Person

…and because chatterbots can carry advertising;

• US$50 revenue for each Chatterbot
• US$660bn
• Variance (-20% to +100%)

Clearly there are many privacy and data protection issues but by using a basic principle of allowing users to control the separation of identity and data, coupled with end user ownership of the organisation that manages it, is the only way.  A Creative Commons for health data with government oversight but citizen ownership.

HOW DOES IT START?

It starts with having a healthy disrespect for the impossible.

It starts with the maxim "We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems." - Margaret Mead

It starts with understanding that “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”  - Seneca

It starts with taking some time to talk to me.

POST SCRIPT

Serendipitously, on 19th February 2009, a German university announced the development of  Assistance for patients: Intelligent sensor networks that remotely monitor important vital signs of patients or measure their activity.  Heart patients simply wear a small, lightweight device on their body.  The device records movement. A physician can evaluate, for instance, the heart rate in connection with physical effort, thus simplifying the diagnosis.

The data is transferred via a home gateway to an Internet portal where the physician can access the information remotely. A range of optional components can be added to the system to measure other vital data such as blood pressure, weight or blood sugar level.

A spectre is haunting the world. The spectre of peer to peer

I was searching through my book today for a Peter Drucker quote on the future of business and came across one I wasn't actually looking for.

In a 2002 interview with Business 2:0 magazine, Peter Drucker said: “The Corporation as we know it is unlikely to survive the next 25 years. Legally and financially yes, but not structurally or economically.” 

At that time, many companies rushed to prove him right;  “257 public companies with $258 billion in assets declared bankruptcy last year (2001), shattering the previous year’s record of 176 companies and $95 billion. This year (2002) is on pace with 67 companies in the first quarter. And not just any companies. Big, important, Fortune 500 companies”

Then my good friend and collaborator Richard Banks sent me an article published recently in BusinessWeek about how the interim search and placement model is being ravaged by the proliferation of online business networks, and indeed the massive rise in global connectivity at an individual level.

In a candid interview with BusinessWeek, Heidrick & Struggles CEO Kevin Kelly recently described his company as having a half-century old business model which must transform if it's to survive. He said, "What keeps me up at night is not Russell Reynolds, Korn/Ferry, Egon Zehnder and Spencer Stuart, our direct competitors, but what is going to happen to this industry. We have a 55-year-old business model, and how many companies do you know that survive given a 55-year-old business model?" 

Sound familiar?  People forget so easily.  In 2003 one of the world's leading interim firms approached me at Ecademy to help them design a network centric approach for sourcing candidates and clients.  They only looked at alternative models because business had dried up due to the mini-downturn in 2001.  As soon as business picked up, actually doing any strategic thinking was anathema.  How well would they be positioned now if they had continued to innovate despite the bull market in interim placement?  Isn't this what the CEOs and boards of companies are paid to do?

Only last year, another huge recruitment organisation's response to its employees using LinkedIn to source candidates instead of its multi-million pound Siebel CRM application was to er.....

Force them through a LinkedIn account deletion process on exiting the company. Here's some advice from our friends at Cluetrain;

Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.

If recruiters don't wake up and smell the coffee, they will become something worse than being killed.  They will become irrelevant.

Our problems (and they are our problems) cannot just be blamed on war, the credit crunch and natural disasters but rather on a fundamental shift.  A shift from one organisational model (command-and-control) to another (peer-to-peer). Peter Drucker also said;

“New ways of working with people at arm's length will increasingly become the central managerial issue of employing organisations, and not just of businesses.”

Now everything is up for grabs and, as a result, what may first appear as an endless series of threats will to others be a rich source of opportunities. Considerable prizes lay in wait for first movers to network centric organisation.

A work survival guide

Great to see more output on the 'future of work' meme.  Ian Sanders's new book Juggle: Re-think work. Reclaim your life.

The book features an interview with the worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi who says, "Jugglers are living the most liberated, free, entrepreneurial, inspirational lives".

I guess I was way too early (circa 2004) with my book on the future of work;

Winning by Sharing is a collection of true stories combined with market research and analysis about the future of work, how profoundly it will affect people in the next decade, and how this will take most people by surprise.

Summarised by the statement.....

"The internet has caused a fundamental change in attitude towards work and the realisation that a 'career' has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life. I now view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude - an attitude that everyone is going to need."

Is the Traditional Theory of the Firm Obsolete?

"The traditional theory of the firm is about the unitary, rational actor that more or less controls all the pieces of the puzzle that it needs in order to produce its outputs” .  .  .  today global companies “ are a part of a huge set of interlinked networks across the planet.” Paul Kleindorfer, Director, Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, Wharton

"Today's marketing world is broken. I give us a `D' because our mentalities have not changed. Our work processes have not changed enough. Our measurement has not evolved.” Jim Stengel, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble.

Inspired by the article published by Wharton Business School.