Knowledge, From Productivity Source to Critical Component

By Thierry de Baillon

This post was cross-posted on ecollab carnival blog, as part of a collaborative thinking about the future of the training department.

Productivity: The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital).

Enterprise has for long understood, and applied, that training and education are an important part of its hunt for competitive advantages.  At operational level, first, training allows for better adequacy between employees, their role, and the hierarchy- and process-based ‘mechanics’ of Enterprise. At competitive level, then, acquisition of new knowledge is for companies both a way to keep best talents in house and a way to setup an innovation friendly ecosystem. In both cases, education and learning have taken a privileged position in professional environments, and is now openly recognized as an important productivity source.

It is quite striking to see how much this concept, rationalized, statutory, acquisition of formal and explicit knowledge in order to maximize individual productivity, is now spread across our whole society, bridging more and more closely business and education worlds, notably with generalization of internship requirements. This concept, however, ceases today to be legitimate.

While apparently justified by security and… productivity concerns, present trend of blocking access to main social networks rather looks like a desperate attempt in denying actual cultural and societal evolution. How could we otherwise explain such practices, as more than 40% of employees will use a mobile terminal to priority access the internet in two years from now? Whether they want it or not, companies will soon face a real organizational dilemma: to witness a drastic individual productivity dropout, for letting employees freely access the social web, or to provide them internally with an environment as much attractive as the one they can find outside. As the ideal enterprise will stay, for long, an almost unreachable ideal, other solutions have to be considered for a vast majority of companies. Finding the most relevant one? This seems quite an evidence for most of us: we have to recognize the importance of knowledge informal acquisition, and to include this activity in the general framework of individual listening and self-training task.

The growing importance of informal knowledge, and its necessary integration into professional education, doesn’t limit itself to external influence. Whether they wish it or not, companies are today involved into collaborative initiatives which question the very foundations of individual productivity. It will have to be more and more transferred to the community, one of its natural functions being training through implicit knowledge sharing.

From being considered today as a source for productivity, in our hierarchy and process-based structures, training will very logically and quickly become one of its critical components. This will ultimately modify existing relations between knowledge, innovation and production. Concretely, and naturally, social learning will pave the way for Enterprise 2.0.

‘Communities’ and ‘Networks’: A Conceptual and Linguistic 2.0 Mess

By Thierry de Baillon

Among the most overheard and misused buzzwords in companies are, you guessed it, ‘communities’ and ‘networks’.  One of the side effects of Marketing 2.0 is, besides embodying new relationships between brands and customers, raising awareness among top managers about the potentials of collaborative work.

Of course companies, particularly the biggest ones, are dealing with internal communities for a few years now, often without truly understanding how to energize and leverage their power, but goofy expressions such as “Facebook for Enterprise” are now making their way into executives wish lists and discourses. Social platforms vendors aren’t helping either. Socialtext’s claim is ‘Social Networking with Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration’; Jive Software presents its SBS software as “robust social networking software for employee communities”. An awful 2.0 mess…

Technology itself, introducing more and more real-time capabilities into platforms, contributes further in blurring the lines between communities and networks.

Both concepts have their place in the connected Enterprise. Not only is the understanding of what differentiates them is key to successfully implement socio-collaborative initiatives, but harnessing their complementarity also provides us with a valuable framework of building blocks to leverage the internal ecosystem of Enterprise 2.0.

Rather than fighting each other, communities and networks may, while serving different purposes, raise quality of connected work inside enterprise. Being fluid and highly interactive, networks can address specific issues out of the scope of a single community. They can be setup on demand, self-arrange to solve problems, then dismantled or put at sleep once the issue resolved. Networks act as powerful ad hoc task forces, their power amplified by real-time tools. Lot has been written about the need or not to embed community-based outcome into existing business processes.  I do believe than working in a connected environment will ultimately lead to replace our actual processes by some new adaptive individually empowered mechanisms, and we can already put this vision at work: correctly driven (and understood, which means they must not been implemented as a substitute for communities but built ASIDE them), social networks have the tremendous power to deliver.

The New Laws of Attraction: Management as Transformation of Value

By Thierry de Baillon

It is quite striking to see how much the mass production era still shapes a lot of our behaviors, whether in our relationships to brands or in Enterprise world. From a customer point of view, while conversing more and more with brands around what I consider as a symbolic transaction, we are still mostly considering companies as products and services manufacturers and distributors.

In parallel, “work as value” is still a dominant paradigm in a lot of companies, which, at same time, are trying to implement 2.0, socio-collaborative, tools and platforms to foster knowledge emergence and capitalization. This is strikingly strong in countries like France, where our President said “travailler plus pour gagner plus” (working more to earn more) less than two years ago. Let’s face this, every effort to facilitate Enterprise 2.0 adoption has to take into account, not only structural resistance, but cultural artifacts from a past era.

Most employees have quite effortlessly switched paradigm, from “work as value” to “work as creation of value”, as it relates both to their day-to-day experience as customers and to their expectations in Enterprise world, but managers are facing a bigger challenge, as they are less and less connected with a traditional (pre knowledge economy era) role of managing teams, and expected to consider management as transformation of value. As obvious as this might be, seem from our Enterprise 2.0 heralds’ seats, we have to keep in mind that organizational and behavioral gap: from gatekeepers of business processes, managers must now dynamically harness existing knowledge to transform it into competitive advantages for their company; a tough challenge for most.

Furthermore, while bringing more agility, adoption of collaborative tools and platforms, whether used in the existing framework of business processes or not, allows for a new type of leadership, combining knowledge fostering with social connections facilitation. Managers will now have to catalyze groups and communities activity, involve them in decision-making as well as in maintaining their inner state of equilibrium, acting as the strange attractors of a complex internal ecosystem.

From their real adoption of what is clearly a totally new role, a role which requires more qualities than ever, will depend success or failure of many companies in this new socio-collaborative economy.

Salesforce Chatter: Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise 2″0?

By Thierry de Baillon

Twitter was bruising yesterday about Salesforce announcement of its new application, Chatter. With a product introduced as a “Facebook for the Enterprise” by a representative of the company, Salesforce just confirmed what is becoming an important trend in Enterprise platforms:  real-time collaboration.

For a long time, the only asynchronous tool used by companies was email, and one of the challenges of Enterprise 2.0 adoption was in helping people getting used of new asynchronous tools like wikis, blogs, bookmarking or tagging platforms, placing them in conditions to deal with knowledge exchange and serendipity values. In parallel, generalization of the Blackberry is putting email back into pseudo-synchronous mode, instant messaging applications penetration rate in companies is about 40%, according to Gartner, and Google Wave is pointing another real-time head into the game. The point, of course, is no more about discussing whether synchronous tools will be part or not of our new toolboxes. They will, for sure, but are they worth the hype?

The Facebook analogy used by Salesforce is indeed indicative of the direction main platform vendors are today heading to; something like “hey, Facebook works as hell, wouldn’t you like to be able to have your employees sharing, interacting, poking each other on business matters? 230 milliions users cannot be wrong”. But is really the Social Web a similar playground as Enterprise? Definitely not. Bertrand Duperrin recently insightfully sketched the differences between managing communities and managing business. While both worlds aim to drive flawlessly working communities, companies need a lot more.

Furthermore, these new tools will put emphasis on time as a critical material, weighting in most process-based tasks. While searching increased productivity along these processes, with the help of real-time facilitators, executives will put further pressure on actual organizations, avoiding to face the necessary cultural shift which has yet to happen. Platform vendors’ “real-time” pitch is with no doubt good for (their) business, as executives will certainly jump in the bandwagon, not for Enterprise 2.0.

This new trend will oblige us to be even more cautious when implementing social tools, as we now must deploy two different layers of interaction, and that, along with leadership, decision-making, knowledge and information, time is the new dimension we have to deal with.

The New Laws of Attraction: Brands Dematerialization

By Thierry de Baillon

Considering that brands are in fact shaped by their customers is anything but new. In 1954, Peter Drucker already wrote:

[Marketing] is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.

The recent frenzy of social media marketing doesn’t say anything but the same, enjoining companies to listen and engage with customers, providing us with a too often over-simplified view of business, where brands and customers seem to be the only players in town. While Enterprise 2.0 is a careful field of many approaches and thoughtful adoption and roll out frameworks, in a number of cases Marketing 2.0 doesn’t appear much more than Advertising 2.0, or Sales 2.0 at its best. Co-creation itself is often reduced at the mass customization level, mitigating customers’ creativity with small scaled processes.

But today’s brands trump any simplistic vision of marketing.  They are part of an ecosystem which encompasses both enterprise and customers; they have to deal with complex multi-channel creation and distribution systems where each actor has a capital influence on their perception. François Gossieaux recently wrote an interesting article about the difficulties inherent to brand positioning in our Connected Age.

The disappearing product

One of the most striking aspects of today’s brands is a complete change of an element which was, until recently, at the center of all attentions: the product. Not to tell that the finality of marketing is no more about selling products, and that offering your customers the best ever products is not of uttermost importance; but what we are experiencing today is a shift from products as personification of brands to products as symbol of value exchanged between brands and customers. As customers’ experience take more and more importance in today’s marketing, brands dematerialize themselves.

Typically, two facets of the classical Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism are now merging,  Physical (product based) aspect getting interweaved with the brand’s Personality, as the brand perception is focused, not on static aspects, but on dynamic exchanges between a brand and its customers.

Brands attractors

As brand perception evolves from positional (physical and “moral” aspects of the product) to transactional, the simplistic view of branding as a brand-to-customer relationship seems understandable, but hides in fact an increasing complexity. The “customer-centric” brand is in reality mostly the more or less conscious result of several traction points. Suppliers, partners, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, delivery, internal and external services, from design to customer support, are all part of the end user experience. Understanding where your brand’s main attractors are, fully preconditions your understanding of the brand perception. Neither it is a matter of controlling the whole chain, nor is it about simple interaction. Branding in a complex world requires a full awareness of positive and negative traction points, as a simple change in any of them might destroy a fragile equilibrium. Changing a supplier might have a tremendous impact on the final product, therefore on your customers experience; staff turnover in a retail point might turn them away…   Your brand relies on several traction points. Get to know them. You might not have any possible action on them, but you will at least be able to prevent any negative impact from a change of conditions.

A Fractal Perspective on Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

By Thierry de Baillon

Whichever definition and/or paradigm we are trying to wrap Enterprise 2.0 in, whichever framework we are tempted to fit it in when boarding key departments from enterprise, one of the main challenges we, practitioners, are facing every day, is to find relevant patterns and routines to foster change and facilitate adoption among employees.

Involving marketing people is usually a matter of one-to-one education, accompanying them in the journey from “listening” to “adding value to your customers’ experience”. Implementing large scale collaborative tools require a different approach, usually a mix between selective evangelization and viral facilitation. But, how far does virality live up to its promises?

The downside of virality

Basically, virality relies on two pre-requisites: a propitious ground, whether it be a shared comprehension of the objectives or a strong sense of community, and a well-defined adoption program. If (and only if, remember that you cannot plan virality, you can at best sustain it) adoption takes off, most people will build their collaborative behavior from observation of a few early adopters or evangelists, triggering a lot of mimesis among participants. Paradoxally, successful viral adoption may lead to misuse of tools or misbehavior.

Early adopters and evangelists have to be carefully chosen to trigger the right behaviors among other people. Alas, the qualities involved in community activity are usually not the very same needed to drive adoption. Moreover, mimesis is often a blindfold, and, in most cases, people will not be able to discriminate a correct behavior, in accordance to their role, from the one induced by early adopters, before the late stage of adoption.

Not to say that virality is a useless factor in Enterprise 2.0 adoption, but in such a closed system, the expected exponential results of virality take the typical S-shape of an innovation adoption curve; the individuals able to induce a different behaviors to community members and to align community roles with business objectives might well be among late adopters, thus leaving a flock of users clueless about real value of Enterprise 2.0.

A fractal perspective

Businesses are complex, dynamic and non-linear systems. Interweaving social tools into such systems require much more than virality. Aligning collaborative practices with business objectives require new social processes to foster decision taking and emergence of consensus in non-deterministic way. At pilot or department level, 2.0 initiatives usually succeed due to the impulsion of a few individuals, but this kind of approach usually doesn’t scale well. Among factors to take into account are corporate culture, meaningful organizational patterns, interactions between every stage of the value chain,… and the need to provide individuals with empowering micro-processes.

From many points, Enterprise 2.0 structure might be helpfully viewed as a fractal structure: recognizable, scalable interaction patterns, instable equilibrium state, complex and quite unpredictable output. In this perspective, how could fractals help us facilitate adoption and maximize value?

• Fractal patterns are scale-independent. Better than relying on early adopters and evangelists, we should try to enroll key actors (managers, facilitators, support functions…) as soon as possible, letting other employees arrange and model their interaction according to these pre-existing business patterns. “Setting clear objectives” is nothing else but implementing otherwise successful patterns into 2.0 initiatives.
• This same scale invariance could help dealing with difficulties inherent to organizational change. Enterprise 2.0 adoption is not only taking what works at some level to evangelize broader initiatives. It is about implementing these same successful features at different level.
• At individual level, the need for micro-processes, or social routines, is easily understood as requested by scale invariance. People should get, inside communities, the very same capabilities and roles the department they belong to has inside the company’s value chain.
• Fractal systems are also characterized by existence of strange attractors, which maintain global equilibrium. Changing little parameters may lead to a totally different state. This is an interesting analogy with the management of internal communities. Raising the necessary consensus is not a role-based process, but rather a practice-based one, which positively accounts for more instability, thus more innovation.

Looking at Enterprise 2.0 adoption and value from a complex system perspective gives us interesting insights on the necessary culture shift to undertake and might provide us with a roadmap to successfully implement and scale initiatives while maximizing a company’s competitive advantages.

The Zen of Co-creation

By Thierry de Baillon

Co-creation is to enterprise 2.0 what “mass customization” is to marketing 2.0: not the Holy Grail, since it is definitely not a delegation of responsibilities, but a breakthrough approach to enterprise governance. Think about it as a way to inject a company or brand’s ecosystem’s output inside their internal processes, resulting in a Moebius band like value chain, each iteration providing value by itself, independently of the process involved.

More than with any other 2.0 internal initiatives, setting up the scene for co-creation needs a cultural shift to happen; fostering the right behavior challenges a lot of corporate attitudes, focusing on continuous innovation and persistent interaction.

Co-creation is not about control, but about persistence of a vision

Co-creation is neither crowd sourcing, nor focus groups. Involving partners, suppliers or clients into co-creation, means that you will have to accept losing control on some of your assets to trigger innovation or improvement. On the other side, you will need to share a consistent vision of what you want to achieve and provide a clear framework to your goals. Do not change the rules of the game in the middle of the road; if you intend to reward the best contributions with money, tell it from the beginning. Since co-creation won’t fit into your existing business processes, you have to integrate its output into a larger sketch.

Expect the unexpected

Zen focuses on the gesture rather than on the goal. You will need to perfect your platform and the way you interact, without trying to drive the output of your initiative. True innovation is disruptive per nature; you won’t be able to seize it if you pave the way before proceeding. Embrace the unexpected as the best way to trigger new solutions to known problems.

Forget your strengths, expose your weaknesses

Fear of competitors is a fierce brake put on your co-creation efforts, as you are here to make up for your weaknesses. A co-creation platform is the less adequate place to pitch your competitive advantages. Humility is key.

You will get as much as you give

The more you give, the more you will get. This looks like obvious, but think about the need for dismiss control; how many businesses are today ready to publicly expose so-called “sensitive” data or jealously crafted processes? Procter & Gamble now famous Connect + Develop website is a perfect example of a successful open innovation platform which leverages reciprocity. Giving is not giving, anyway. As Marcel Mauss exposed in “The Gift”, exchange of goods always has a symbolic dimension which goes far beyond the simple act of freely giving up a property. While giving, the deep ownership of gifts remains property of the owner, and cannot be redeemed unless a counter-gift is made. The behavioral nature of exchanges without market is an inherent part of co-creation initiatives. You are not creating a marketplace, even if you reward the submissions; you are in fact creating a value process.

Avoid destruction

The nature of co-creation could easily lead to destruction of value, either by entering too deeply into the exchange process (internal destruction), or by ignoring creative inputs apparently too far away from your expectations. A consistent vision should avoid you the first possibility. Keep in mind that disruption is not destruction, but another angle to consider known assets. Always consider positively any input, no matter how destructive it might look at first glance; just consider it from a different angle.

Keep the shortest path from ear to mouth

As a last bit of advice, report as frequently as you can. Inform the whole company about your initiative progresses, as internal resources are also part of the co-creation process. Engage and inform your external stakeholders, as they are now part of your business processes.

The 2.0 Siloed Enterprise Syndrome

By Thierry de Baillon

Who, in your company, is in charge of supporting your communities or social media efforts? The marketing department? Human resources department? Sales, customer relations, innovation? Dedicated off-processes community managers? If you answered marketing, chances are good that you are a brand trying to connect more deeply with your customers. If you answered Human Resources, you might be a Fortune100 company trying to leverage your workforce’s competencies through collaboration. Sales, you may be an internet pure player. Innovation, you sure are engaged into co-creation…

Delegating your social business experiments to the most involved departments is a good way to focus on successful outcome. Whether to set up a pilot or to develop a whole social media strategy, all key actors have to be actively committed. As more successes will pave your way, you will be able to measure the positive impact of communities on business, to adapt best practices to different departments, hopefully to evangelize a community-based approach and spread it through the whole company.  All of this sounds great (even still a bit utopist)… on paper, but in reality, you will soon be trapped into a 2.0 Siloed Enterprise.

Different department have a different approach to business, different organizational requirements, and present processes have an interesting impact: they rationalize a company’s relationship with the different parts of its ecosystem, no matter who is in charge of dealing with a particular stakeholder. In a typical Enterprise 2.0 organization, those stakeholders’ activity and point of view influence the company’s organization, leading to very different behaviors as appropriate.  Instead of nurturing an organic interactive system, communities would grow as disjoint entities.

The other day, my friend Gabriel Rossi posted three great tweets about marketing and its pivotal role inside enterprise, which we often underestimate. Marketing is one of the key activities which may act as the internal ‘glue’ to help a community-based enterprise grow, if properly leveraged.  But one approach doesn’t fit all. Your company might be sales or R & D oriented, and this might have dyed its entire operation. Finding the missing link,  the department which has cross over influence on your whole organization, and involving it in every of yours social media efforts is a crucial step toward Enterprise 2.0. If the only one you can find is the mailroom, then your company might be in deep trouble in the forthcoming times…

Management 2.0: What Enterprise Could Learn From Social Media Rock Stars

By Thierry de Baillon

Trying to reconcile marketing social media success stories with an Enterprise 2.0 vision looks apparently like a daunting task, but, behind all the bells and whistles, examining the mechanisms of successful customers service and marketing initiatives may give us important clues on the cultural change needed in most companies.

How trustful is trust?

Trust is a key feature of success. This has been underlined, written and proven so many times that it seems obvious. Engaging with customers, leveraging positive sentiment and leveraging conversations inside a community is based on trust. Free trust, the one marketers have to earn through interaction and authenticity.

Most companies and managers consider trust as acquired between coworkers. But this doesn’t take into account the fact that trust is mainly a cultural construct. The pressure of hierarchy, the balance between power and autonomy, all play a different role in different countries. Bertand Duperrin recently published an interesting post about national (notably French) specificities regarding to working behaviors. Seeing trust as a priori given might lead to misunderstanding the complex relationships existing inside a working team, from Japanese giri to Indian deep sense of hierarchy. In most (maybe all) countries, Enterprise is a world of constrained trust.

In that context, “unboxing” the necessary trust to power the right dynamics is a key issue in managing a community-driven company. Less than ever, management is not community management, as this must be accomplished, not only at team or practice level, but at any dimension involved along the hierarchical path.

Instability management

Successful marketing campaigns involve much more than empowering a community of good willing customers. Getting out of a brand’s comfort zone, turning bad sentiment into positive, pushing the envelope to trigger creative outcome, are common features of good social media practices. On the other hand, in Enterprise world, business processes and the need for raising a consensus often hide the heterogeneous aspects of collaboration. There is no wonder that innovation and co-creation, although the most promising outcomes from Enterprise 2.0, are so difficult to reach.

While being a challenge for most managers, introducing disturbance in communities’ behavior is a necessary step toward value creation. “Instability management” will become a crucial task for middle managers, as the levels of complexity and reactivity of the community-based enterprise will increase.

Corporate Culture Is Infrastructure – My Twitter Interview With Cindy King

By Thierry de Baillon

I had yesterday the privilege to be interviewed by Cindy King, on Twitter and on her blog, about cross-cultural communication. My answer to one of her questions (“Culture is…” in one word) raised a few interesting comments, and leaded me to further thinking. Culture is infrastructure.

From the fast growing literature about Enterprise 2.0, I only read few things about interaction between corporate culture and the necessary changes induced by embracing social tools behind the firewall. The relationship between governance, managerial routines and corporate culture is nevertheless far from easy to unveil, and has important implications in driving 2.0 initiatives.

Every company has a corporate culture

Even if not clearly communicated or formalized, relationships between employees, working habits and managerial style always define a set of embedded hard-to-move rules. Understanding these rules is a crucial step in determining which initiatives will or won’t be successful.

It is not always what you think it is

While CEOs and founders usually imprint their own vision as a corporate culture, reality is often a bit different, as day-to-day work usually follows its own path, independently from formal business processes. Micro-interactions are here much more important than macro-statements in determining the collaborative ability of a company.

Not all corporate cultures are suitable for E2.0

Apple is of course an obvious example of a company which successfully stays away from social media. A strong and meaningful corporate culture has by itself as much power as today’s most evolved social platforms.

Changing corporate culture is the hardest task to undertake

Changing an operating system takes time and commitment, but switching infrastructure is a radical move. Collaborative routines can easily be introduced in the most top-down company, as long as the wish to collaborate exists. Here too, look at micro-interactions between people to get a clue about potential success.

As usual, it is all about people

The fact that networks and communities must be driven by clear business goals shouldn’t obscure the key role of the Human Resources department.  The larger the initiative, the stronger the HR commitment and support might be.