Winning by Sharing

Social Business: Can you handle it?

Social Inside (Photo credit: ixtlan)

A proposal to speak at an event being organised by My Customer

 

The biggest untold story of the 21st century is about the end of command and control as a useful model for orgainising the production of goods and services.  Network centric, self-organising peer-to-peer models of organisation aren’t just preferable, they’re a matter of survival.  This talk will explain why becoming  a social business isn’t just about new ways of working but the creative destruction of a 5,000 year old model of organisation that’s passed its sell by date. Question is, can you handle it?

Too much, too far, too fast?

The future of job applications

The Obvious Corp was started by the founders of Twitter and Blogger.  They're kind of quite influential.  Their 'work with us' call to action is pretty simple in terms of telling them who you are.

For the creative classess this is pretty much the future of job applications.

Super Connectors. The role of HR in the 21st century

Image by ixtlan via Flickr

To get an idea of what's inside this paper here are a few choice cuts.

Abstract.  This essay makes the case for the role of a Super Connector in large organisations whose sole responsibility is to create the same levels of connectivity, collaboration and productivity achieved by open source movements, conversational software and social media platforms.  It recognises the need for evolution rather than revolution and most importantly describes the end game, and the implications for leadership, employees, revenue, stakeholder investment return and market valuation.

 

The horrific events of September 11th and their aftermath, including war, restricted mobility, big government, and fear.  The banking crisis, crippled economies, the shift of power to the East, pandemic flu, climate change, peak oil, the war on terror, the emergence of social networks the size of continents, a black US president. When will things get back to normal? They are. This is the new normal.

Business and government aren’t structured or designed to cope with this rate of change and it’s apparent even to the layman they’ve struggled to understand, react and adapt to a seemingly endless stream of social, economic and political crises, many of which don’t even arise in their own countries.  

Productive professionals make big enterprises competitive, yet these employees increasingly find their work obstructed. Creating and exchanging tacit knowledge through interaction with their professional peers internally and externally is ‘what they do’. Yet most of them squander endless hours searching for the knowledge and access to people they need, even when it resides in their own companies.

The future of an organisation is a lot less about the nature of its issues, as it is about its capacity to invent social structures able to solve them.   That’s why social software is at its most transformative inside the organisation and the implications for its performance, sustainability, value and long term survival, are far reaching. 

Leaders get their support and power from the ‘bottom’ of the organisation where as chiefs and managers get theirs from the ‘top’.

 

Image by ixtlan via Flickr

The Super Connector is a network.  A network with ‘clue’ with the ability to build social software applications.  It’s not a single person, although it does have a leader, but it’s more about a group of people dedicated to delivering services that extract untold value from existing resources.  In effect, ‘doing better with less’.  But it needs the same level of investment as any other strategic shared service.  In return, the Super Connector can bring about profound measurable organisational benefits in revenue, productivity and the cost base.  So what’s the value proposition?

 

Read the whole thing by downloading the PDF.

 

 

 

Download The role of a super connector hr

Age of the part timer

January 2010 and Businessweek's front cover on the new permanent temporary worker.

February 2011.  London's Daily Mail newspaper's headline is;

Age of the part-timer: 200,000 jobs were created last year. Only 3 per cent were full-time

The Guadian Newspaper on the effectiveness of Job Centres in the UK for white collar workers.

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. (2001-2005)

Many are culled.  Few are chosen.

Enterprise social media. Does it really make a difference?

Image by ixtlan via Flickr

The horrific events of September 11^th and their aftermath, including war, restricted mobility, big government, and fear.  The banking crisis, crippled economies, the shift of economic power to the East, pandemic flu, climate change, peak oil, the war on terror, the emergence of social networks the size of continents, a black US president. When will things get back to normal? They are. This is the new normal.

Business and government aren’t structured or designed to cope with this rate of change and it’s apparent even to ‘the man in the street’ they’ve struggled to understand, react and adapt to a seemingly endless stream of social, economic and political crises, many of which don’t even arise in their own countries.  

In business, entire industry sectors have seen much of their value destroyed by upstarts using cheap, open source technology, offshore software development and financial support from visionary venture capitalist firms.  Some parts of the media industry in particular have experienced massive destruction in value, most significantly by the omnipresence of file sharing networks.  TV, print and broadcast based advertising in general are in decline and the next generation of consumers simply aren’t interested in it, almost exclusively preferring peer recommendation.  Even the porn industry has been eclipsed by social networks and social media sites, now the most visited web sites on the planet. 

Mass action and mass participation enabled by internet mediated social software has forced political u-turns, embarrassing corporate climb downs, regime change, and put presidents into office.  The biggest story of the 21^st century is the realisation that a 2000 year old model of centralised, command and control organisation is unable to adapt to an ‘outside world’ that is increasingly network centric and decentralised.  It isn’t fit for purpose. It’s that simple.

Productive professionals make big enterprises competitive, yet these employees increasingly find their work obstructed. Creating and exchanging tacit knowledge through interaction with their professional peers internally and externally is ‘what they do’. Yet most of them squander endless hours searching for the knowledge and access to people they need, even when it resides in their own companies.

Mckinsey reported in 2005, “Each upsurge in the number of professionals who work in a company leads to an almost exponential—not linear—increase in the number of potential collaborators and unproductive interactions. Many leading companies now employ 10,000 or more professionals, who have some 50 million potential bilateral relationships. The same holds true for knowledge: searching for it means trying to find the person in whose head it resides, because most companies lack working "knowledge markets."

 One measure of the difficulty of this quest is the volume of global corporate e-mail, up from about 1.8 billion a day in 1998 to more than 17 billion a day in 2004. As finding people and knowledge becomes more difficult, social cohesion and trust among professional colleagues declines, further reducing productivity”.

This essay makes the case for the role of a Super Connector in large organisations whose sole responsibility is to create the same levels of connectivity, collaboration and productivity achieved by open source movements, conversational software and social media platforms.  It recognises the need for evolution rather than revolution and most importantly describes the end game, the end state; and the implications for leadership, employees, revenue, stakeholder return and market valuation.

Many are culled. Few are chosen.

Image by ixtlan via Flickr

So the Chancellor, George Osborne, has announced the details of his Comprehensive Spending Review and although the blows are being softened by spreading public sector job cuts over the life of this parliament, many will be culled with few people being chosen.  Those people who will find themselves in the court of the unemployed, in which there is no chance of appeal, will ask questions. Where and when will I find another job?  Where will I live if I can’t pay the rent or mortgage?  How long can I last before signing on? How will I keep the lights on?  When will things get back to normal?  They have.  This is the new normal.

But there is hope and there are alternatives but to exploit them, we’re going to have to see the world of work through a completely different lens, a world that has been impossible to perceive during the good times by workers and especially by the government. That lens can be defined by a single statement; the unit of work is no longer a whole job. The nature of work in the developed world has changed forever and the prospects are particularly grim for middle class, white collar workers, so called knowledge workers that form the largest group of those people directly affected by the cuts.

The perfect labour storm

In the past fifty years some 1.5 billion people have been added to the global labour pool  setting up what has increasingly been described as the perfect labour storm brought about by the wholesale offshoring of work to low wage economies.  This isn’t just about factory and call centre workers.  It’s about lawyers, medical specialists and the entire category of knowledge work. Research by Professor Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, suggests that somewhere in the region of 40 million jobs will be lost in the West across 817 categories of knowledge work within a generation.  In 2008, 1.4 million qualified people applied for jobs with one of India’s largest IT services company, Infosys.  In Japan, Yuji Genda, Associate Professor, Institute of Social Science University of Tokyo published a book in 2008:  A Nagging Sense of Job Insecurity.  His research predicts that only one in two people will be employed in Japan in the year 2050 if current trends and policies prevail.  Earlier this year research in the US predicts that all new jobs are being created by start-ups. Recently IBM announced it would make almost 300,000 employees redundant and hire them back as freelance workers between now and 2017, although the political backlash it created forced them to retract the strategy.  In any case, the fact that many companies are thinking this way should send a powerful message to knowledge workers.  Big firms and the government aren’t hiring and traditional jobs in advanced economies are not coming back anytime soon.

The new permanent temporary worker

In January 2010, BusinessWeek published an article on the new permanent temporary worker in which it describes the story of a home based call centre worker living in the US who handles customer enquiries for consumer brands managed by a service provider called LiveOps. She logs on in the morning for 45 minutes then takes her child to school and returns to work for another couple of hours.  She is paid by the minute, in this case, 25 cents per minute. Last year Odesk, a kind of ‘eBay for work’ service that brings together buyer and sellers of ‘knowledge work’ had 350,000 workers registered and a value of jobs posted of $285 million and during the credit crunch grew by 400%.  The founder of LiveOps is starting a new ‘on-demand’ workforce service called ReadyForce.  The UK equivalent, PeoplePerHour.com has 68,000 experts and a £13 million value of jobs posted.  The nature of work is increasingly fractional.  Fractional workers derive their income from multiple sources online and offline.  Unfortunately public policy is still based on the assumption that careers are the most desirable form of employment, and that they can be offered to more and more of us. The government’s Work Programme initiative aims to provide services to white collar workers who’ve never had to look for a job until the onset of the global financial crisis.  Job centres refer these workers to private service providers, contracted by the government to help them prepare for another whole job. These service providers such as MyWorkSearch, CareerPlan4Me and many others are funded by the government to provide online tools to help white collar workers in a way local job centres can’t, others like The Plus Team provides an offline service that at least gives job seekers an opportunity to receive group coaching and network with each other. The problem is these services guide people to prepare for whole jobs that simply don’t exist.  We’ve seen weak, modest ‘whole jobs’ growth in the UK but tellingly, ‘the quarterly increase in total employment was mainly driven by part-time workers, which increased by 166,000 on the quarter to reach 7.93 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992’. Charles Handy (The Empty Raincoat) and John Malone (The Future of Work) were right after all in that where in the past an organisation was like a castle, it will become more like a condominium: "an association of temporary residents gathered together for their mutual convenience".  This may take a generation to play out and the transition will be painful but the net benefits to individuals and society in the long term are far greater than those provided by traditional modes of employment.

The support economy

A promising new approach to harnessing the value of knowledge workers is being pioneered by Ki Work inspired by the ground breaking book, The Support Economy that has predicted the shift from ‘managerial capitalism to ‘collaborative capitalism’.  Ki work has developed a platform that enables individuals to form virtual companies that can provide services to any business anywhere in the world that in some categories can actually be cheaper than offshore labour because it can be provided on-demand.  It can be switched on and off.  With the right so called ‘deep support’, advice and guidance, knowledge workers in Britain can adapt and indeed thrive but need to realise that a ‘career’ has ceased to be a feasible way to organise working life.  To adapt to new ways of working, knowledge workers need to prepare for, and seek out multiple sources of income.  More than this, they need to realise they’ll get better support from each other than from the institutions that are supposed to serve them.  They need to learn how to create value by collaborating to bring products and services to market that compete head-on with big brands.  They need to view work as an instrument of self-development and personal autonomy and entrepreneurship not as a status symbol, but as an attitude.  An attitude everyone’s going to need. 

Is your network black or white?

Image via Wikipedia

"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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Networks Having Success Recruiting Physicians - Twitter, Sermo and More (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• Another addition to the tribe and honor for physician and humanitarian, Dr. Robert A. Hingson (scienceblogs.com)

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.