Many thanks to @flapinta for pointing this one to me (french link). What a revelation !

Isaac Getz is is a professor of Idea, Involvement, and Innovation Management at ESCP Europe. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Stanford University and at the University of Massachusetts. He graduated in Computer Science, then obtained a M.Sc. in Management Science, a Doctorate in Psychology and a post-doctoral degree (HDR) in Management.

I usually don’t spend too much time providing information on the business thinkers I quote, but considering the content, I just wanted to make sure Isaac Getz is not mistaken with some kind of hippie smoking ganja on a beach in Goa.

With Liberating Leadership : How the initiative-Freeing Radical Organization Form Has Been Successfully Adopted (pdf) Isaac Getz received the accolade of French Management Union of engineers (SYNTEC) with the Academic Prize of Management (french link again).

This 26 pages essay provides us with further evidence that methods of management that arose in the 50s (Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor), have been successfully applied by dozens of world class companies and market leaders in their area (Toyota, Southwest Airlines, USAA, Avis, WLGore, QuadGraphics, FAVI in France etc …) to foster employees engagement. The amazing thing is how they align with the management principles that are consubstantial to Enterprise 2.0.

In a time where leadership has never been so critical for businesses, some lessons to remember from this essay :

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As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on trying to sell Enterprise 2.0 as the ideal solution for your organisation.

But to be completely honest, depending on your company objectives, values and culture it may just not work.

10 principles your company may have adopted that will make Enterprise 2.0 implementation counter productive … Read more »

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Bertrand Duperrin makes an interesting analogy in his post Will Adam Smith drive business in the future ? His take :

(…) Opposing a top-down and directive model an emerging relying on the existence of an “ invisible hand” that, in the same way as Adam’s Smith theory in economics, would make people personal actions and choices contribute to a collective purpose without the need of organizing anything.

I guess the difference between the enterprise and the market is that within the former, people (ideally) are working with the clear goal of collectively creating value and making the company richer. While in the latter the goal is to individually create value to make oneself richer.

Bertrand then sets a table comparing Enterprise 1.0 (strict), 2.0 (anarchy) and Rationalized 2.0 (ideal organisation).

My take : Bertrand’s Rationalized 2.0 is Enterprise 2.0 with a strong and clear leadership. The invisible hand in Adam Smith Enterprise is the leadership. Read more »

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God bless Jon Husband : he pointed me via a Twitter conversation to his telling blog post (Will Enterprise 2.0 drive management innovation) on Fast Forward blog, where he quotes Gary Hamel FAN-TAS-TIC book : The Future of Management.

To start with, Gary Hamel is not an obscure blogger or some kind of geek preparing the internet revolution. He has been ranked the most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal ahead of personalities such as Thomas Friedman or Bill Gates. Therefore, it won’t be as easy for corporate afficionados to dismiss his theories as it may be to dismiss Cluetrain Manifesto’s chapters by Chris Locke ou David Weinberger (regardless of how brilliant these are).

This is fascinating essay. Lucid, smart, driven by a relentless desire to find the truth and to help the reader find the one of his company. Read more »

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Towers Perrin has published the results of a Global Workforce Survey they made about employees engagement. The survey has involved about 90,000 people over 18 countries. The objective was to rate the level of engagement of the people in their work.

People are split into 4 groups depending on their level of engagement :

Engaged: Those giving full discretionary effort, with high scores on all three dimensions.

Enrolled: The partly engaged, with higher scores on the rational and motivational dimensions, but less connected emotionally.

Disenchanted: The partly disengaged, with lower scores on all three components of engagement, especially the emotional connection.

Disengaged: Those who have disconnected rationally, emotionally and motivationally.

What Towers Perrin found out does not give much credit to management : only a fifth (21%) of the workforce is engaged, twice as much (41%) feels enrolled, a third (30%) feels disenchanted and almost a tenth (8%) feels disengaged.

Costs of lost engagement

This excellent study also shows the cost of lack of engagement. On a three-year study, companies with high employees engagement show a positive evolution of operating margin (+3.74%) while companies with low employee engagement show a 2% reduction of their operating margin.

In addition, it shows that this engagement strongly affects the belief people have regarding the impact they can have on the company innovation, productivity, costs, growth and customer satisfaction.

Three conclusions from this report :

1. The global workforce is not engaged — at least not to the extent that employers need their employees to be in order to drive results.
2. Engaged employees are not born, but made
3. Employees worldwide want to give more, but they also want to see a clear and measurable return for their effort.

Now : let’s see how and where Enterprise 2.0 can help in nurturing engagement …

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This is a question I love to ask in the Enterprise 2.0 interviews :

Broadly speaking, one can say that there are 2 types of Enterprise 2.0 activists. The revolutionaries and evolutionaries. The formers believe that collaborative platforms are disruptive technology that will deeply change the organisations. The latter think this is an incremental evolution that will just fill up some communication holes that are not covered in organisation 1.0. Where would you stand ?

Andrew McAfee talks about new way of doing business in his Enterprise 2.0 book, of disruptive technologies in his PARC talk but still reckons that this is not such a big deal. We can see here that evangelists position is not very comfortable.

On one hand going towards the revolution paradigm risks scaring executives out of it. On the other, minimizing the disruptive nature on Enterprise 2.0 may slow knwoledge workers buy-in and adoption as it may curb their enthusiasm.

First approach is more of an Executive show-stopper while the second is more of a knowledge worker tue-l’amour (desire killer) and adoption obstacle. What’s best ?

Funnily enough, two of the main Enterprise 2.0 figures posted completely opposed post on the topic this week : Oscar Berg on one end and Bertrand Duperrin on the opposite. The former regrets Our Tendency to think and talk in terms of efficiency while the latter is pleased with the end of social washing in his Enterprise 2.0 Forum wrap up. Read more »

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Big up to Kongress Media (Thomas Koch, Bjoern Negelmann) for organising such a superb event in Paris. Both ON (the conference) and OFF (parties in the evening) were fun and it was so nice to hang out with Enterprise 2.0 people (@bduperrin @flapinta @cflanagan @an_elm @tlg @ceciledemailly @tdebaillon @gculpin @aponcier) in real life.

Local Consulting firm NextModernity (Bertrand Duperrin, Richard Collin) acted as moderator and contributed to make the whole thing casual yet focussed.

Great organisation, great speakers but most of all : great real life projects feedback. Featuring : Claire Flanagan (CSC – multi-awarded project), Anu Elmer (SwissRe), Jérôme Poujardieu (Dassault Systems), Fabrice Poireaud Lambert (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Nicolas Rolland (Danone), Julien Le Nestour (Schlumberger), Jean-Paul Chapon (Alcatel Lucent) et Jane McConnell (NetStrategy).

A high number of common best practices have naturally emerged. Here are 10 of them : Read more »

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(Hi It’s Cecil here. A french version of this blog post is available on Heavy Mental)

The Enterprise 2.0 Forum to be held on 17 and March 18 in Paris at the Meridien Montparnasse will present some case studies. The Swiss Re project is one of them.

So I’ve contacted Jive Software for an interview to check Jive situation today (rather good as the Gartner Magic Quadrant tends to show) but also their view on that project.

I owe quite a lot to Jive. As part of my job, I invited back in summer 2008 Devan Batavia (VP Sales EMEA) to give us a presentation on their product, then Jive Clearspace today Jive SBS (Social Business System).

It was a revelation. All the problems of knowledge management, innovation, productivity in a global enterprise and complex environment, all these problems that I was intimately involved with in my everyday job, all appeared in full light in one of the most relaxed and most professional presentations that I have ever witnessed.

To such extent that it has inspired my own presentation Enterprise 2.0 and allowed me to put order in my ideas and shed light on an irrefutable truth : my subject is Enterprise 2.0.

Devan has politely declined the interview and rerouted me to Nathan Rawlins to answer them. Nathan is Sr. Director of Product and he is in charge of steering the revolution of the Social Business. A bit of Jive promotion of course, but many ideas and comments that are worth visiting … Read more »

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I have been thinking about this topic for a while now. Enterprise 2.0 book from Andrew McAfee chapter 8  (Looking ahead), a nice twitter conversation with @oscarberg, and a New York Times article about Microsoft Creative Destruction : all combine to convince me there was some room for a blog post. Snip from the NYT article :

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As Wikipedia defines it :

“Office politics is the use of one’s individual or assigned power within an employing organization for the purpose of obtaining advantages beyond one’s legitimate authority. Those advantages may include access to tangible assets, or intangible benefits such as status or pseudo-authority that influences the behavior of others. Both individuals and groups may engage in Office Politics.”

One has to be extremely pedagogic to explain me how on earth this may help the company in being more profitable, increasing customers satisfaction and being a better place for employees, the three goals of any company according to Eliyahu Goldratt.

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Early Strategies has just released a fresh an extremely useful report on Enterprise 2.0 and the current level of adoption.

This international (FR, UK, NE, US) survey (summary) was conducted between November 2009 and January 2010, targeting Multinational Companies (MNCs) and international organizations (France-Telecom, Cisco, AT&T, Amadeus, IBM etc …). The clear intent was to study change execution.

This report sheds a bright light using real life examples on favorite topics of the Enterprise 2.0 Activists community : cultural values, strategic reasons, change agents, executive champions, management inducements etc …

This analysis is precise enough to distinguish different results depending on the type of company business (B2B, B2C). It’s pretty interesting to see the consequences this difference creates in companies adoption strategy.

The results and conclusion on strategy, maturity, change, policy but also on people daily work and perceived usefulness have priceless value for anyone wishing to embrace the subject of Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) adoption.

Last but not least, the report addresses the ROI issue, the one most E20 activists are the least comfortable with – Andrew McAfee included. Early Strategies approach differs as it distinguishes tangible from intangible ROI. thus provides a completely different perspective on the whole thing.

Together with McKinsey’s and Cisco, probably the most insightful report on the topic I’ve read so far.

Tech It Easy has been lucky enough to have the opportunity of an interview with the person behind Early Strategies : Cecile Démailly. Impressive professional background, real enthusiasm and insight on the ESSP topic, and a charming person : Tech It Easy readers deserve no less …(Note, I’ve bolded+italicize most interesting and valuable parts- there are quite a few). Read more »

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Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) are now at the doorstep of the enterprise. The question one may ask is : how does it fit alongside the already existing Enterprise IT systems.

Companies have spent a fortune during the last 10 years implementing business critical Enterprise wide systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Yet another system could be seen as a risk for the balance of the whole company IT strategy.

In his enlightening book on PLM (Product Lifecycle Management, Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking) Michael Grieves proposes a map to illustrate the positioning of PLM together with the main business critical IT systems.

This blog post extends this map and propose a perspective on Enterprise 2.0 platforms positioning.

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After reading the excellent Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0 book, I was wondering if there was any point for Heavy Mental to publish yet another review. There already are plenty around with Venkatesh Rao’s on Enterprise 2.0 blog and Gil Yehuda’s probably being the most interesting ones.

It might be more valuable to offer a perspective focussing on the Adoption part of the book. By and large, the adoption topic has been the one sparking off most of the conversations and thinking on the Enterprise 2.0 topic. The idea is to confront McAfee work with a reference on the topic of adoption of innovation : Diffusion of Innovation : by Everett Rogers.

In all fairness, I haven’t read Diffusion of Innovation. I only know it through Scott Berkun presentation on innovation (already mentioned in a post on the subject). Scott quotes Everett Rogers work :

The diffusion of innovation is based more on sociology and psychology than on technology. Here are the things technologists hate : whenever they come with innovation, the main forces against the innovation adoption are sociological ones : ego, envy, fear, pride, politics, security etc …

These are the factors according to E. Rodgers to evaluate how likely your solution is bound to be adopted :

• Relative advantage : what value does it bring ?
• Compatibility : how much effort to transition to this innovation ?
• Complexity : how much learning is required to apply it ?
• Triability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
• Observability : How visible are the results ?

Enterprise 2.0 represents innovative ways to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge among distributed teams in the organizations. So let’s see how Mc Afee writings answer these questions …

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(French version)

The pitch: Enterprise implementation of social networks is the third step of a gradual immersion of the enterprise into the internet culture. This immersion occurs because there is the obvious truth : web works with amazing speed on an amazing scale.

I have been lucky enough to witness from the inside the major changes the IT industry have been going through in the last ten years. What is really interesting within the scope of Enterprise 2.0 is that these changes involve the adoption of tools, solutions and approaches that really came from the internet culture.

As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on wondering where to find meaningful experience of internet culture adoption in our company. The IT department is the place to look because they already been through the first 2 steps of immersion ….

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I do admire Geeks. I have nothing but respect for their work.

Their contribution with open source software to today’s world is unquestionnable. The idea that a bunch of coders came up with such great solutions as Firefox, Linux, Gimp, Eclipse, OpenOffice, JBoss (and all Java Enterprise frameworks) to name a few that I use on an everyday basis, this idea is just amazing.

Back in the day when I was working for In Fusio, a start-up doing video games and services for the mobile phone industry, I had this wonderful opportunity to work with a bunch of the most talented ones. These guys implemented the first over-the-air download system for mobile phones back in the early 2000′s. In 2 and a half years I’ve learnt as much as I would have in ten years in any other company.

What I’ve noticed though, is that geeks are not passionate about products. They are passionate about technology.

Just like old tribes have rites to pass and become a man, one has to harness the technology to get some consideration from a Geek.

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