Female guru alert: Amy Edmondson in July/Aug HBR

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School appeared on our recent list of Overlooked Female Business Gurus, and she has also published an article in the July/August Harvard Business Review. Titled "The Competitive Imperative of Learning," it's a blockbuster that will cement her position on the guru list for some time to come.

Edmondson persuasively argues that a focus on efficiency in most companies chokes off resources for innovation and learning and creates an environment of harried, fearful employees rushing from task to task. Sound familiar?

In such an environment, given that the business, market and competitive playing field are changing continuously, the certainty is that the company will lack the learning, vision and insight to adapt itself to new realities. In essence, it will become a highly-efficient producer of last year's products and services. The market will have moved on.

Edmondson's work complements that of Dave Snowden and Mary Boone on the Cynefin Framework. Snowden & Boone describe simple and complex business contexts and the challenges these different contexts pose to managerial decisionmaking. In simple contexts, best practices and efficiency are the tools for success. But in complex contexts, learning, experimentation and adaptation are key.

As Edmondson points out, "the influx of knowledge in most fields makes it easy to fall behind." In other words, the space where competitiveness is created today is the complex space.

Three key inhibitors to learning environments are time, safety and review. Efficiency-based companies don't allow time to think and reflect--the emphasis is on processing and dispatching tasks quickly. (Gary Hamel discussed this issue nicely in "The Future of Management.")

And few companies provide the psychological safety required in a learning environment. Learning requires failure, failure is stigmatized, therefore people try to avoid it. Or if it's unavoidable, it is covered up or played down.

I can tell you based on my work to date on The Mistake Bank that psychological safety is a big issue. I have had numerous dialogues with colleagues, members, mentors, etc., which have involved the ramifications if someone were to discover the mistake the person has contributed to The Mistake Bank.

[My position on that matter is this: people who admit mistakes are more valuable to companies, customers and colleagues than those who don't--because we all know that everyone makes mistakes. No exceptions.]

Finally, Edmondson emphasizes the need for disciplined reflection and review. By evaluating, discussing and communicating the results of new ways of doing things, companies achieve the payoff of experimentation. My experience is that most companies don't like to look back.

There's a lot more to the article than I've discussed here. Read it when you have some time to think and reflect! (Better yet, talk about it with a colleague.)

Related posts:
Great innovation requires great teams
Leaders need to manage complexity
Toyota excels by revealing hidden problems
Stop studying the problem and just try something!
On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management"
For consultants, adopting the "Google 20%" is vital

Tags:
complexity, decisionmaking, teamwork, collaboration, innovation, learning, Harvard Business Review

There's a web2.0 hammer for lots of business nails

I was talking to a prospect today and they mentioned that their recent expansion had created an entire new level of people involved in their business. In other words, their staff now was communicating with end-clients through an array of agents and contractors, which had not been the case as much in the past. This raised the concern with them that they would not hear stories, both good and bad, from the front lines, and that they would struggle to communicate out to those end-clients.

After they finished speaking, I offhandedly said, "Have you thought of starting a social network where your clients, agents and contractors could all contribute?" Their kind of business has some strong unifying factors and a social network, to me, was a natural step to aid in the kind of communication they wanted.

They grabbed right onto the idea. It brought to mind Josh Bernoff's ("Groundswell") recent statement that few will make a business out of providing web2.0 tools to consumers, but many companies will thrive if they can create tools for use inside businesses.

And in today's business world, there are opportunities to use these tools to greatly improve information flow, collaboration and idea generation. Here are some thoughts:

wikis...for group collaboration
social networks...for communicating with customers/partners
blogs and RSS...for communicating and listening to the broader industry or world at large
social bookmarking...for sharing interesting ideas
microblogging...to create a feeling of a virtual workspace

There are countless other possible examples. Andrew McAfee has an interesting take, where he assigns tools based on the strength of people's ties. He also usefully points out that these tools work best when structures are allowed to emerge from the interaction of the participants, rather than being imposed by some authority.

(Picture by gerard79 via stock.xchng)

Related post:
Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, collaboration, communication,

Making and keeping commitments: a must for success in business

In a brief but potent post, professional-services expert David Maister points out the importance of keeping commitments. (I touched on this topic in an earlier post.) Writes Maister,

It is OK to need more time as long as you ask for it ahead of time. It is OK to struggle and ask for help.

It is not OK to break your commitments. The fastest and surest way to fail is to break your word.

It's a concept so basic as to seem trivial--yet the inability to create and honor commitments between co-workers, between managers and workers, and between workers and clients destroys value every single day, in every company, all over the world.

Maister focuses on one side--the responsibility of the assigned party to honor commitments. The other side also has responsibilities. Often people ask for commitments in a wishy-washy manner, which at minimum creates confusion and ambiguity, or at worst enables commitment-phobes to feign performance by using ambiguity as a rationale for non-action. Here are some examples:

1. Manager A sends out a note to entire team asking for something to be done.
2. Worker B sends email to co-worker, stating, "It would be great if you could do task X by next Friday. If I don't hear from you by tomorrow I'll assume that's OK."
3. Client C makes the same demand several times, ignoring any counter-proposals made in the meantime, hoping to wear down the vendor until they simply agree out of fatigue.

In these cases, the ultimate responsbility, unfortunately, reverts back to the assignee. You frankly can't allow people to get you to do things without creating the environment for a strong commitment. You need to probe and negotiate: "Which of us do you want to take this on, boss?" "I just got your note and I'm afraid I can't meet your desired date. Can we discuss and come up with an alternative?" "Help me understand why you want it done this particular way." etc. And then work to shape the request into a proper commitment that you can perform.

The environment that W. L. Gore Industries created (profiled in the new Gary Hamel book), is ideal for commitments. Any staffer asked to do something can accept or refuse the commitment. Once accepted, the commitment is expected to be completed. And a rigorous 360° review process incents people not to refuse every commitment (Bartleby the Scrivener wouldn't last long at Gore).

management, organizational behavior, commitments, collaboration, customer+management, consulting

How enterprise 2.0 adds value to the connections between workers

Andrew McAfee, the Harvard Business School professor and formulator of the term Enterprise 2.0, shows us that there's more than one way to create a great blog. He doesn't post every day, or every week, even. It's been a month since his last post. But when he does post, it's the Web 2.0 equivalent of a scholarly paper. Detailed, well-reasoned, and complete.

Call his blog the anti-Twitter.

I write this because his new post is significant. Those of us who regularly work with Web 2.0 tools take it as a given that they can help businesses. Who could argue that more sharing and collaboration is harmful, we think? Unfortunately, this type of reasoning, or lack thereof, can't convince a skeptic to install Enterprise 2.0 tools in his data center and let them loose with the employee base--especially given the threat they pose to the information hegemony of senior management and the IT department.

Luckily, McAfee has been thinking about the "why" question. And in his latest post, he describes the value to businesses of Enterprise 2.0, by aligning its tools to the ties between workers--strong ties, weak ties, potential ties, and even no ties.

For example, wikis allow teammates (workers with strong ties) to collaborate on a deliverable. On the other end of the spectrum, prediction markets allow workers with no ties at all to contribute to answering a question or predicting a future result.

In sum, Enterprise 2.0 allows businesses to enhance value from the ties between workers. McAfee presents this conclusion in a very simple table.

So, we have our explanation. It's time to open up the data center. Who's with me?

social networking, information technology, web2.0, enterprise2.0, collaboration, Andrew McAfee

It's not just the network, it's making the network work

I was discussing this recent post about the ability to connect being more important than one's individual work output with my Vice President of Common Sense (a.k.a. Maura).

She said, "There are lots of people who can create networks, but there aren't many who can use those networks to get things accomplished. That's the real difficult task."

And I really couldn't respond to that at all, because, you know, she's right.

networks social networking connection collaboration

Who you know may be more important than what you can do

I read something today that was so counterintuitive it just might be true. Patti Anklam, the author of "Net Work, A Practical Guide To Creating And Sustaining Networks At Work And In The World," quotes in her blog fellow knowledge management expert Stowe Boyd on the value of personal networks:

It will happen, he said (or I am paraphrasing; I did not take notes), that having a larger number of connections is more important at work than simply doing a job well, or in his words, on a great slide show from his site titled Flow): "Productivity is second to Connectivity: network productivity trumps personal productivity." That is, the more connections you have the more resources you have to bring to a task: all work can be co-work.

I read this on a day when I talked to people in Chicago, the UK, suburban Washington and Seattle. And when I emailed a former colleague in Texas to locate someone's phone number to get to the Washington contact. And... you get the picture.

I had always looked to my intelligence as the supreme asset I brought to the workplace. It's taken me nearly forty-five years to learn that my (virtual) Rolodex is far smarter than I am.

And it works harder too.

(Photo by Frances Twitty via istockphoto.com)
networks social networking connection collaboration

In the future, senior executives will work together harmoniously to achieve shared goals for their company

So say Professor Yves Doz of INSEAD and Mikko Kosonen (formerly of Nokia), who write in this month's Harvard Business Review ("New Deal At the Top" - link $$). Here's their view in a few words:

Senior executives at new deal companies assume collective - not individual - responsibility for results. They do so by building interdependencies... motivating themselves to engage with one another rather than work in splendid isolation.... Challenges to conventional thinking are encouraged - as are challenges and criticism from outside the ranks of the top team...

Sounds great, doesn't it?

Yeah, I don't believe it either. There are so many things in this model that are counter to human nature, never mind management selection and conditioning, that it's difficult for me to believe that a company could work in this way (perhaps a democratic company, but how many of those are there?). Every glimpse I've had into the senior executive conference room (and I spent six years in one) has shown a very different picture of the "deal at the top."

Let's take them one at a time.

1. Collective responsibility for results - flies in the face of the passion companies have for individual accountability (call it accountabalism, like David Weinberger does).
2. Engaging with one another - senior executives have rivalries over budgets, targets, and the next step in the hierarchy--never mind substantial individual workloads--that make it very difficult to engage deeply with their peers.
   
3. Challenges to conventional thinking - I heard the now-discredited Bob Nardelli speak last year, and when referring to Home Depot he said "I this" and "my that"--never "we" or "our." And read this Business Week article to see how James McNerney slammed in Six Sigma during his tenure at 3M, without debate or reflection. Last time I checked, GE (where both CEOs came from) was considered the premier senior management talent factory, and they don't sound ready to embrace participative management.
   

I also thought this quote was telling:

Claus Heinrich, an executive board member of SAP and the director of global human resources, put it like this: "If I see Leo [Apotheker, a fellow board member and head of customer operations] doing a great job, I say, 'Wow, great!' I am quite willing to subordinate some of my own priorities to help him achieve the common goal."

Very warm and fuzzy, but as I read that I wonder how his year-end performance review would go. "Yes I know I didn't make my objectives this year, but I was subordinating my own priorities to help Leo achieve the common goal!"

It's possible that all six companies I worked for were utterly dysfunctional, but I tend to believe that senior executive rivalry is innate in the people who rise today to those positions. [And when I was a senior manager, I was right in there fighting for my goals, my department, etc., along with the rest of them.] Only the exceptional company, with a different training and career-pathing process, which considers a different kind of person to promote, will be able to overcome it. There may be a day when all great companies are run by X-Teams, but I think that day is a long way off.

(Photo: "Teamwork" by candace.jeanne via flickr)

leadership teamwork cooperation collaboration

Web 2.0 gives a new meaning to works-in-progress

You can't see it till it's finished
David Byrne, "Artists Only"

There was a time when writers, musicians, artists went "deep in the shed" (search this page for a definition) and emerged, months or years later, with completed masterworks.

No more. Now books, records, presentations, etc., are previewed and assembled online, for all to see. First drafts, alternate endings, even books created with input from the audience are de rigueur. In a recent "Fresh Air," from National Public Radio, drummer Paul Motian remarked on how appalled the late pianist (and perfectionist) Bill Evans would be with the "complete box set" (including alternate takes, restarts, etc.) of the Village Vanguard sessions released in 2005.

In some way, this trend echoes the time-honored academic approach of circulating drafts of scholarly papers among a group of peers for comment. Of course, now the peer group is everybody with an internet connection.

It's another way, I suppose, in which we are more exposed to the world. Our privacy is reduced, at our own initiative. But it's fun, too. Not in an exhibitionistic way, but in a trusting, welcoming way. With more of our foibles, mistakes, and misunderstandings out in the open, perhaps we are more human, and the distance between us shortens a little bit.

(Photo: Talking Heads Japanese newspaper article by artlung via flickr. Creative Commons attribution license)


web 2.0 user-generated content collaboration

Making and obtaining effective promises--it's important and rare

OK, it's taken me an entire month, and my next issue of the Harvard Business Review is already in my mailbox, but I've finally absorbed the lessons in April's article entitled "Promise-Based Management: The Essence of Execution" (free link) by Donald Sull of the London Business School and Charles Spinosa of Vision Consulting.

The article contains straightforward advice on the importance of commitments to conducting business, as well as the poor way commitments are typically negotiated, with the expected result--nothing happens and negative surprises abound.

(Ever experience that at your workplace?)

By the way, straightforward doesn't mean simple to do. And that's the beauty of the article and why it's not something that sinks in over a quick read. Making and keeping (as well as obtaining) quality promises is very difficult, and poorly done at nearly all organizations.

And important too. With job specialization and matrix management, and especially today's alliance-based business environment, the potency of direct authority has waned. To get many things done at companies today, you need someone to agree to help you.

Sull and Spinosa give concrete examples of companies that use promises effectively. They also list five attributes of workable commitments:

1. Public--good promises are shared outside the requester and provider
   
2. Active--they are negotiated, but not part of prolonged debates (best quote: "Conversations should comprise offers, counteroffers, commitments and refusals rather than endless assertions about the state of nature")
   
3. Voluntary--people who promise under duress don't feel obligated to deliver
   
4. Explicit--commitments are clearly described and progress tracked
   
5. Mission-based--requests are put in the context of strategy and objectives, so that providers know why the request matters
   

(Photo by pixelstar via stock.xchng)

alliances, commitments, collaboration, Harvard Business Review

Web 2.0 - coming soon to your office desktop, or not?

A great post by corporate IT guru Andrew McAfee last week chastised FastForward conference attendees for their blind faith that Web 2.0 tools will gain widespread adoption in business. And it got me thinking about how companies and individuals use Web 2.0 tools differently. Here is one conclusion:

The great convenience and usefulness of Web 2.0 tools has spurred their rapid adoption by consumers (e.g., 50 million+ blogs, according to Technorati), while concerns over security and control of information have inhibited their adoption by corporations.

And that's much to the detriment of business. Collaboration is essential to any business. And with large businesses in particular, collaboration across distances and other boundaries (organizational, time, national, etc.) is mandatory. Yet IT departments don't know how to deal with some of the best tools--wikis, blogs, content tagging, social networks, etc.--that can benefit that collaboration.

Like individuals, businesses will have to give up some of their obsession with confidentiality and privacy in order to make use of these tools. The companies who figure out how to solve that equation first will have a great advantage. The rest will be wondering, five years from now, what happened.

knowledge management, information technology, web2.0