Interesting Enterprise 2.0 Readings - Week 8 2010

"...rule-following employees are worth zip in terms of the competitive advantage they generate".

Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
Compliance is simple to measure, simple to test for and simple to teach. Punish non-compliance, reward obedience and repeat. Initiative is very difficult to teach to 28 students in a quiet classroom. It's difficult to brag about in a school board meeting. And it's a huge pain in the neck to do reliably. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.
Janine Nahapiet of Oxford University opens up the morning...Her central proposition is that a knowledge economy is a relationship economy, and the basic mechanisms of sharing are social processes. This will of course depend on trust and distrust, but the returns to trust are huge...Increasingly innovation comes from the outside. She suggests that over the next couple of decades this will increase and we will look to new places for ideas, not just India and China but also Africa. Our western paradigms are not working and may be getting in the way of things.
Eric Fulwiler: "The trust bureaucracy"
In business, the inefficiency of many bureaucracies stems from the same lack of trust we all experience online. In most mid to large-sized companies, employees work in a system where trust is a scarce and highly valuable resource. If a manager can trust his/her employee, he can delegate more effectively and avoid time-consuming micromanagement. If this system of trust were to be implemented across an entire bureaucracy, employees would be able to create their own trusted corporate networks in which reliability, accountability, and productivity flowed freely.
The Mayo Clinic, founded on the principle of collaboration, is taking collaboration and innovation to the next level. With a mission nothing short of transforming how healthcare is experienced and delivered, Mayo’s Center for Innovation integrates emerging collaborative tools into processes and culture...Besides asynchronous social tools, Mayo is now piloting instant messaging in several departments including nursing and radiology. Paging, a precursor to instant messaging, is deeply engrained in Mayo’s culture. Anybody can page the CEO and expect a prompt call back. Hierarchy is muted at Mayo, and the CEO is always a practicing physician. Mayo’s culture is ripe for IM and unified communications through which people can connect spontaneously through IM, voice or video regardless of level, role or region.
Watson Wyatt, a human resources consultancy, does a large-scale annual survey looking at return on investment for communication strategies. One section of this year’s report focused on Social Media as used by 328 organizations that collectively represent 5 million employees in various regions around the world:
  • The most prevalent reasons for not increasing the use of social media stem from a lack of resources and knowledge, rather than legal restrictions
  • Companies that are using social media to engage employees are using these tools to address a variety of topics. The most prevalent topics are collaboration and team building, adapting to change, and promoting health and wellness.
  • Highly effective communicators are using social media tools 2-3 times more than the low-effectiveness group of companies to reach employees. Most participants (65 percent) expect to use social media more next year.
People are willing to pass judgment, with or without good information. Where examples of one’s competence or reputation are lacking, people will construct whole profiles of another’s personality from what little information is available....Olson finds that when only text is available, participants judge trustworthiness based on how quickly others respond...Psychologically speaking, responsiveness makes it easier for others to attribute our misdeeds to the situation, rather than our personality...For establishing trust, video is better than audio (with no video), and audio is better than a chat window...The more non-substantive information the medium can convey, the more data a listener has to decide how trustworthy the speaker is.
Why don’t star ratings provide the nuanced content quality evaluation that sites hoped for? It turns out that people take the effort to rate primarily things they like. And because rating actions are socially visible, people use ratings to show off what they like...The simpler “thumbs up” or “like” model, found in Facebook and FriendFeed has taken precedence over star ratings systems. This simpler action can surface quality content, while avoiding the illusory precision of five-star ratings...The use of a rating system should be seen not like a “set and forget” rollout, but as an experiment with goals...Be prepared to make changes if your initial experiment teaches you things you didn’t expect.
Oscar Berg