BoostZone

MyPath, a career destination

In this Beta world, in the middle of a crisis affecting employees and
employers, when so many ask themselves questions about their career,
Manpower is launching a very open beta experimental destination called
MyPath. It is fundamentally a community site and a career management
destination with tools allowing one to identify his/ her skills, finding
others to share ideas with about jobs and career advancement, etc. It
is open because it is for everybody and not only for "candidates"
looking for jobs. Actually it could even be an interesting destination
for employers to recommend their employees to go to (instead of
jobboards where few employers would recommend their employees to hang
around ...).

It is still an experiment in beta format, still
only mostly oriented toward North America, still lacking some size and
content (was launched today) but one can already see the potential such
a destination can have for the World of Work.

I would suggest to anyone to go (including for those happy in their job, absolutely), to register and to comment anywhere on the site.

From a
social media perspective and from a World of Work perspective it is
extremely interesting. In particular because vs. all existing
destinatiion it does not aim at  forcing you into a job posting (for
employers) or a job search (for individuals) but it is here to help
individuals to build their career.

The fact that Manpower, the sponsor of this destination,
launches this in a crisis period (the staffing industry is in
devastation) and with the real aim of helping individuals to better
find their way into the World of Work is a great example of corporate
social responsibility at work.

 I think this is
something that could be big.

Dominique

The World of Work is not flat

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.

1 - The very concept of World of Work is different across geographies, let's be very careful not to "average" our OECD view. The World of Work is absolutely not flat, the issues are quite different across countries except probably for the ones dealing with social disparities.
2 - The very notion of "crisis" is quite different and the meaning of it for Australian, Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Argentinian is also very different. Here again, when we Europeans or Americans speak to a global audience, let's be careful not to look too much OECD centric.
3 - Some industries are growing very fast, this is particularly the case of mass middle class tourism, but while the demand is there, the skills are not... and the money is coming. Even in the middle of a crisis, tourism is very active. Large capacities are being built in many places and they often are for local tourism (e.g. Cochin backwaters boats capacity, Angkor temples hotel capacities). Long range international tourism may slow down, locat tourism will flourish non stop because those who can access to it, the middle class, really want to enjoy.
4 - The relations between geo politics and the World of Work  are more and more important and perceived as such by the populations, they are not abstract anymore and depending only on major events like wars. Examples: Australia economic situation and employment depend on relations with China (and its thirst for natural resources); Vietnam economic health and labor market depend on the  situation in China on two accounts: on one hand for industrial employment (since industry location can now be arbitrated between China and India) and on the economic and political situation in Thailand on the other (for tourist attraction).
5- India and China are important everywhere for everybody and many see their future as depending on theirs.
6-Digital strategy is not a gadget for OECD countries, it is expected, in a form or an other, all over the place and the most important media will be the mobile phone line. Local farmers and fishermen in many places really do communicate to get the market prices in various local markets for selling their goods.

These are just a few illustrations, they illustrate in my view some of the care we have to take when we believe we are at the center of the World....

The Web 2.0 and the electric motor

Le Monde, the French Daily, published an article, link below, on the web 08, the leading event on Web2.0 created and managed by Loic Le Meur.

http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2008/12/10/le-web-08-une-ambiance-d-avant-la-bulle-sur-fond-de-crise-economique_1129404_651865.html#xtor=RSS-3208

The tone is ironic and probably exaggerated and since I did not attend being out of the country I can't confirm or infirm what is said.

But the second level substance, the one you read between the lines, is very interesting. These gathering start to look like "passé", or "déjà vu", and remind one of what happened at the end of the Web1.0 bubble. Many new web companies had predicted the end of brick and mortar for many players, the arrival of a new world that would change everything. They were partly wrong and partly right as we know. But more importantly there is no more conference on the Web1.0 today because the technology is here, full speed, has changed a lot, has been integrated into every business model.

Having a conference today on how the web1.0 would change the world would be analogous to one on how the electric motor has changed the world and will change it further. There might still be conferences on electric motor's innovation and revolutions but no one cares except the electric motors manufacturers and the manufacturers of products that may use these electric motors. Electric motors have indeed changed the world, yes, they continue, yes, but sowhat?

The Web 1.0 has changed the world, yes, it continues to have a huge impact, much bigger than web 2.0 by the way if you look at all the ways basic e-commerce is still sea-changing the business world, yes, sowhat?

The same will very soon apply to Web2.0. And this is what permeates between the lines of this, and a few other, article.
 
The real question is therefore "sowhat?" In other words, how will the society change because of the electric motor, sorry the web 2.0 (the big switch analogy of Nicholas Carr), how will individuals relate to their employers, their family, their friends, their employees, their political parties, their local communities, their church, etc. ; how will corporations relate to eachother? What is the model of society this leads us to?

The technology is important but at a given point it becomes irrelevant as a central topic of discussion and the applications'implications (not even the applications themselves) become the heart of what matters.

Now let's be fair, this is much more complex to analyze and debate than any technology discussion, and --- although we still need these conferences in order to be able to think one step further with our social glasses on top of the technological ones--- what becomes more important is to follow, field by field, the deepest implications. Corporations have stopped discussing which collaborative technology to use for instance, and they focus on how collaboration changes management. They are right, web 2.0 technology does not matter anymore because they know it is here and it can do a lot and it will do a lot more in the future (like the electric motor) but the how to use it and how to apply it matters a lot because there is still a lot of unknown for them on change management.

Putting "Enterprise 2.0" in perspective

The entire buzz around Enterprise 2.0 starts sometimes to seem a bit unrealistic and even boring to some, including me, and some relative perspective is needed.
It is true that Web2.0 is ill defined in general and that enterprise 2.0 means different things to different people. It is actually part of the issue: undefined words cover fuzzy realities and do not help. But in most cases “Enterprise 2.0” means the use of collaborative tools, developed in the world of the society itself --- in particular in that universe called Web2.0 --- and imported into the corporation. The aficionados of web 2.0 would like to think that the Web2.0 will in itself revolutionize the organization by creating corporate collaboration cultures of a new breed where hierarchy would disappear; collaboration would bring harmony and progress; etc.

It is even demeaning for the current revolution happening to corporations to pretend it to be mostly or even only related to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Something much deeper is happening. Many of the changes to happen within corporations will have other sources than collaborative technologies.

Let’s be realistic, Enterprise 2.0 seen as the sole center of the management revolution is a fallacy, the revolution happening to the enterprise is much more interesting than just the part of it related to web 2.0 elements even if I am one of those pretending that a good implementation of collaborative elements within the organization can bring a competitive advantage.

Just to start, let’s note that the world is not yet on Web2.0. Just think that Linkedin has only 30 million members and Facebook only 90 millions. It looks big for Social Networks but these are drops in the bucket of the world of work. No surprise then that most employees in the world, even in OECD countries, just don’t really know what Social Networks and collaborative tools are.

Then, even if everybody would be familiar to these new tools, like more or less today they are to mobile telephony (although again the owners of mobile telephones are “only” half of humanity) this will not mean that corporations are all going to become Enterprise 2.0 or, if they are, it will be because they will have found the tools convenient or necessary to use, not because they will have changed out of the very pressure of the web 2.0.

Those putting all the change requirements on the Web2.0 revolution miss the point and fall into the old trap of seeing every problem as a nail because they hold a hammer.

What are the major changes a CEO currently has to look at for planning his organization’s future?

•    Energy scarcity and cost
•    Talent scarcity and cost
•    Ageing of his workforce and of his customers
•    Economic crisis and uncertainty
•    Environment crisis
•    IT revolution (in particular the Big Switch of Nicholas Carr and the implications on data management, storage and interpretation)
•    Terrorism
•    Internal and external social disparities
•    Migrations
•    Etc. this is not an exhaustive list, by far.

Most of them are not related, or just via indirect ways to Web 2.0

In front of these issues the questions a CEO asks himself about his company are of three orders

1.    Which strategy in times of uncertainty?
2.    Which organization can provide a competitive advantage?
3.    How to guarantee that execution will follow?

The web 2.0 plays mostly a role on the second one. I will not address one and three here. They are out of my immediate objective for this post.

If we look at how to transform the organization itself into a competitive advantage, one must again realize that the Web2.0 issues are only secondary, i.e. one of the tools helping to solve some of the issues.

What are the most important organizational issues that trouble a CEO’s sleep?

•    Where to produce the product or services? here (on shoring), or there (offshoring), or on the cloud (cloud shoring) when international trade is at stake for several products;
•    Should one company produce oneself or outsource and externalize? An even more important question in a world of cash scarcity and where “stick to your knitting” has suddenly a different meaning;
•    Which systems and structures to put in place to attract, recruit, develop, and retain the right talents when talents really are the scarce resource? This include managing the NetGens and their Web2.0 habits but also more fundamentally managing four generations working together in the same corporation with different expectations and practices;
•    How to build the newly required CSR, environment issues, and energy efficiency into the organizations weaving and not only within the communication toolkit?
•    How to build flexibility within the organization? In particular in order to be able to respond to brutal unexpected crisis like terrorism or to further degradations in the economic climate or to brutal changes in the value of assets or the cost of commodities;
•    How to build the next global-local work organization maximizing the use of talent available (what I call Net-Taylorism)?
•    How to organize internal and external collaboration in ways productive for the corporation (yes, this one implies some web 2.0 technologies, among others)?
•    How to build practically customer loyalty at a time when they will be harder and harder to motivate?
•    How to manage huge databases and mine them in order to build a competitive advantage based on ones capacity to better understand and target users, employees, targets, etc.? Which is mostly a question of systems and algorithms, not of Web2 .0.
•    Etc. again this is not the place to expand too much on that issue.

What I want to convey as a message here is double:

Let’s not the blame of all the changes that corporations need to put in place on the web2.0‘s revolution only. The collaboration culture created within the society at large, at least at the Netgen level, is a fascinating element, and it is important to understand more deeply the practical implications it will have on management. Agreed and let’s go on working on it, but…

Let’s recognize that the changes required are actually much broader and much more interesting that the simple web 2.0 approach would let believe. Let’s work on them as a holistic system change, what actually is the very notion of paradigm shift.

This is what the Boostzone Institute (www.boostzone.fr), is working on.

Dominique Turcq 25th November 2008

With the crisis Organizations will accelerate their move toward more collaboration

Organizations’ evolution towards “networks and community” centered organization will be accelerated through the crisis. Corporations will have to create more transversal elements within the organization. We generally speak about a talent marketplace, a knowledge marketplace and a community/networks marketplace. This new NCM Network Centric Management will prove a competitive advantage (or a disadvantage for the others) during the crisis.
Three reasons:
•    Strong (and fast) collaboration between executive team members will be required to analyze jointly the implications and to coordinate the executions. Executive teams have an opportunity to apply to themselves the dynamics of community management.
•    Task forces across silos will be essential: to execute decisions, to generate more innovation, to maximize the response effectiveness to external shocks, to be more responsive to client’s demands in order to be more competitive, to improve skills and processes in order to make faster productivity progresses. Nothing really new but a real accelerator potential for competition in what will be shrinking or more complex markets for all.
•    Individuals are already boosting their activities on public social networks like LinkedIn, they will also boost their internal networks in order to be more visible and have a better and faster access to information. Everyone is already noticing the power of internal networks and communities, in time of crisis the benefits are even more obvious since time and value is the essence and communities allow just that: time acceleration and value leverage.
It will have serious implications on the way the work is organized within corporations and will allow communities and networks to become clearer parts of the organization, relegating the old “org chart” to the museum. The new simple descriptions of organizations (as simple as org chart were) are still to be invented.

the 35 - 50

The 35 -50 the Lost Generation

Have you noticed how much is spoken and written about the “Netgeneration” and about the “Babyboomers” recently, all over the OECD? Yes for sure, you just can’t escape books, conferences, articles about them. But have you noticed how little is said about the one in between and in particular the 35 top 50? Actually it is sad because this forgotten generation is also in a difficult shape. I regularly test with my conferences or courses audiences how many of the participants are aware (and if possible participating) to Web2.0 locations like Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, etc. The lowest rate is amongst this lost generation (my sample is mostly Europeans and is not statistically significative). I wondered why. I was also actually concerned several times at clients where we were implementing collaboration cultures, to see that the most importance resistance came from those people in this age bracket, and they were often amongst the most influential and internally powerful; they were the CFOs, the CIOs, the head of internal audit, etc.  Then I understood something: they are scared of what the new technologies imply for them . And the reasons are simple: they were not born digital, far from it, and they don’t understand this digital world because they don”t have kids of the right age and they don’t have time to focus on the Internet development especially around the WEB 2.0 concepts; they are often insecure in their position and see change as a threat; they tend to work very hard and see any new “stuff” as one more constraint on their time, attention span, even week ends. And on top of it, they are supposed to know, because they are at positions of responsibilities, they have to lead teams, to manage the corporations in the middle of rough waters, with Babyboomer bosses on their backs and Netgenerations chasing them. Wouah, next time you see them, be kind to them.

How to cope with it? Probably with a lot of training, some reverse coaching as was done at the beginning of the Internet era for mail and navigation when the same problem occurred, a lot of reassurance that in any case even those who understand and use the tools are actually quite bad at understanding their social implications, etc.

If well managed the lost generation can become an important asset in this changing world, especially within the next five years while the Babyboomers will be a fast disappearing specie.

corporate communities and SN communities

The illusion of collaboration within corporations is often that by putting a collaboration system in place the results will be  an enhanced collaboration. But it does not work most of the time, even with the best tools in place. Surprising? Not really. The most important part of any collaboration system is not the software but the “social” software, i.e. this hard to define set of attitudes and behaviors that lead individuals to get closer to each other and to work together.

We found in our practice with corporation putting in place collaboration systems that several factors of this social software can be outlined. Two examples.

The first one is obvious: colleagues are colleagues, not friends. Contrary to friends, colleagues are not chosen, they may not like each other and they are asked to do things together, but the “what’s in for me” is seldom obvious.

The second is more subtle but as important. While the same kind of tool can be used for internal and external collaboration ecosystems, the reasons for joining and the focus of work make the two models actually quite opposite.

The external collaboration, be it in communities, on forums, etc. relies mostly on two dimensions: individuals think the collaboration can develop or help them and possibly others; individuals are at the origin of the working groups thus created, willingly joining and debating. The ‘What’s in for me’ is a social and personal development. When individuals contribute on TripAdvisor or Wikipedia they  know they are building a constantly  improved social construct.

The internal collaboration on the contrary is generally required or suggested by the hierarchy, individuals are assigned because of their role within the organization, and the purpose of the created community is to improve a process or any element of an activity. A core example is a Community of Practice. The “what’s in for me” is less obvious than the “what’s in for the company”

The implied difference in culture is huge. Closing the gap will not be a question of “motivation” or of “collaborative spirit” but more prosaically a question of rewards and recognition. People who develop collaborative skills in the outside world will apply them internally IF there is something for them to win. Employers implementing collaborative models will have to evaluate the possible rewards. They differ by company but can be in terms of prestige, internal expertise recognition, psychological rewards, etc. as well as in terms of participation to the benefits of the output, be they in cash, in career advancement, or in free time for one’s personal interests.

The Corporate Community Quadrant

There is a lot of confusion about communities within corporations. This confusion blurs the thinking on objectives, on adequate tools etc.

Making a long story short and therefore not going into details, I propose the attached framework for clarification.

The world of communities is divided into 4 quadrants; One barrier is the firewall of the corporation i.e. only corporate members can have access; The second barrier is the specific password required to be allowed access to a specific community.

The 4 quadrants are then the following:

IP GENERATION(inside corporations, selective membership): here only coopted or selected experts can work together, this is the realm of "IP creation Communities of Practice" (COPs). These communities use specific rules, specific jargons and specific tools. This quadrant is the one where "next" practices are developed (vs. best practices).

IP LEVERAGE (inside the corporation, accessible to anybody belonging to the corporation): This is the  territory of dissemination COPs, of communities of interest, of Knowledge Management documents being made available, of internal folksnomy and tagging. These communities may use other tools, certainly have other jargons and respect other rules.This quadrant is the reservoir for improving productivity, best practice diffusion, etc.

CO CREATION (outside of corporation, selective membership): This is the area of Communities with alumni groups, suppliers, customers, closed social networks, etc.this quadrant allows new forms of experimentation and creation. Again new tools (or other tools configuration) are required, different jargons are used, different rules are observed.

INTERNET BRANDING (outside of corporation, total visibility and availability); this is the territory of open communities of interest, blogs, open social networks, candidate attraction, forums, etc. this quadrant builds the brands of the corporation (volontarily or not). The tools here are often the usual ones of the Internet, the jargon has to be understood by everyone, the rules are the ones of this totally open world.

Please Mention Boostzone Institute - Dominique Turcq if you use this copyrighted tool.

Communities vs. networks vs. collaborative teams vs. Social networks

Several conversations in the last days have made me think that we need to progress on some definitions. The confusion between the terms might be troubling for a few.

Let me propose the following simple operation oriented set of definitions (as opposed to an academic one)

·         A directory is a facebook with more or less elements about the members, including in general their contact details. The most sophisticated directories describe the content of an individual’s experience and knowledge. LinkedIn or University alumni directories are the best examples. No specific activity is expected from a member (except to pay its membership or its usage fee, even the update of one's profile is voluntary).

·         A networking platform is a technical system allowing individuals to know that other individuals exist (like a directory) and proposing ways to contact them. It can be called “network” if there is no ambiguity (e.g. a telephone network, an alumni network, the Internet to a certain extent; LinkedIn). Such network has no activity in itself except as a connector and in some case as an aggregator of individuals according to certain criteria (like LinkedIn’ groups or Facebook’ networks and groups). No activity is expected from a member but anyone can propose things to others.

·         A social network is a group of people who are bound together through some social relationships. The bonds between some of them might be tight but in general the bonds between members are relatively loose. They more or less know each other directly or via one or two intermediaries. A social network has no strict boundaries and changes all the time as people join and leave. On the web, you belong to a social network when you are registered on a “social networking” platform. Older examples include the Lyons, the Rotary, etc.

·         A community is a group of individuals having some level of personal bonds with each other, for any reason that could range from friendship to business to family to residence to culture to religion, to politics, etc. A community can have all sorts of activities, from chatting to creating knowledge to organizing events to having fun etc. Communities are generally formed within networks. Therefore a professional usage of networks can accelerate the birth or growth of communities (it is particularly important within corporations). It requires, for being active, all the tools of the network, the collaborative team, the social network and the directory. Contributions from members are encouraged and are the very substance of the community. Without activity there is no community but not every member is required to be active on every activity and every time. A community allows members to be as active as they want on what they want. The “politics” of activity therefore is part of a community i.e. the fact that some members are more visible than other, that some appear as leaders, other as followers, others as neutral listeners. What distinguishes a community from a social network is the gate keeping:  the social obligation of its members for one another or the required closeness of ties implies that not everyone is welcome to join.

·         A community of practice is a community of professionals whose purpose is to create and share knowledge on a given practice common to all members (e.g. a community of cardiologists). Its objective is to foster incremental innovation. They are not necessarily “colleagues” nor “friends” and their relationship is purely on narrow professional matters.

·         A collaborative team has a purpose, producing an end product. It is a group of people defined by a final joint deliverable, which can be a methodology, a piece of software, or a complete knowledge repository. It may have an indefinite life or a finite life, the usual example is Wikipedia or Sourceforge. In many cases what corporations call Community of Practice are in reality collaborative teams expected to deliver regular updates and progress paper on specific issues. Contributions from members are expected along the lines of the purpose. Politics are not welcome and silent members are often rejected de facto if not de jure. In most cases members are “colleagues” and have no other relationship with each other than the project at stake.

Finally I do not approach “technologies” here because they might be very different for each situation. The most important difference might be actually in the content rather than in the name. A technology can provide a “directory” but the word might as well mean a simple address book or a sophisticated profile. The same is true for any feature and therefore does not deserves to be discussed within the same stream of discussion.

Wikinomics à Paris

Wikinomics, "How mass collaboration changes everything", est le nom du livre de Don Tapscott qui a le premier illustré en quoi le management collaboratif a déjà changé nombre d'entreprises.

Don sera à Paris et présentera son livre (qui sortira alors en Français) mais s'esprimera en Anglais lors d'un petit déjeuner organisé par L'AFPLANE (Association Française de Stratégie des Entreprises) et l'Institut BOOSTZONE (Centre de recherche et d'information sur le network centric management) le 9 novembre au Cercle France Amérique. Pour plus d'information et pour vous inscrire (d'urgence car le nombre de places est limité) voir sur le lien: http://www.afplane.org/eQ_eventinfo.php3?id_event=65&id_rubrique=8