Interesting post by Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the parallels between having influence on Twitter and the new competencies for success.
In the 21st century, America is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within organizations. Maintenance of organizations as structures is less important than assembling resources to get results, even if the assemblage itself is loose and perishable.
Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action that shapes daily tasks and one's portfolio of projects, in order to focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effectives than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.
This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has the best network wins."
Originally posted at the 2020 Social blog
Gaurav and Gautam collaboratively wrote this blog post on a wiki. This is the first in the series of blog posts where we will explore how social technologies, when used effectively within the organization, can create significant business value for Indian firms.
A TYPICAL CONVERSATION
Ever since I joined 2020 Social three weeks back, we have had several interesting conversations with Indian firms of all shapes and sizes on how to use social technologies within the workplace.
The typical conversation starts when someone fills the “Ask Us How” form on our website: “I am excited by the possibilities of using social technologies within our company and want to explore what these technologies can really help us with.”
During initial discussions, it becomes clear that the client faces a business problem, but she is not able to make the connection between how “the business being social” will help her solve her problem.
In the first post in this series, we have outlined three typical business problems several Indian firms are struggling with. In the next three posts, written over the next week, we will share scenarios for how social technologies can be a part of the solution.
SCENARIO 1: PRODUCT INNOVATION
Bedi Electronics has been amongst the top ten firms in the Indian consumer electronics industry over the last twenty years. Its 1200 employees are spread across six plants and twenty sales offices. Over the last two years, it has fallen behind its competitors in terms of product innovation.
Rahul Bedi, the 28 year old scion of the family, has recently taken over as the Chief Marketing Officer of the business. Rahul knows that his 250 frontline sales officers have the pulse of the market. However, Rahul gets to meet them infrequently, in annual sales conferences and monthly market visits. They share interesting product ideas with them during one-to-one interactions, but he doesn’t know how to validate them with other sales officers and build on them.
“I wish I knew how to learn about consumer preferences from my frontline sales officers,” Rahul said to Gaurav, “help them build upon each others’ ideas. If we can revitalize our product innovation process, Bedi Electronics will regain its strength in the market.”
SCENARIO 2: TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.
Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, was concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seemed to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the reason why this was happening was that the nature of serial processing that the work required meant that a delay in emailing (due to whatever reason) would impact the final output by a large extent.
Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.
“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”
SCENARIO 3: BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE
Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.
Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.
Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.
When Gautam met Sumit and Shalini, Sumit explained his dilemma: “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years. If we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights.”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Now that the stage is set in all the three scenarios, you must be wondering: what happens next? Find out in our next three posts.
Amazing post by Cisco's VP of Enterprise. Go read the full article. Some excerpts
For most companies, people represent an untapped asset – a resource that becomes especially important for companies that must grow their business without adding personnel.
This means that corporations must design a cognitive stimulus plan based on employee contributions, and business must embrace some admittedly unusual notions about how, where and when work occurs, and how employees collaborate. Some of these notions recently arrived from the Web 2.0, social networking realm.
It is time, though, to recognize that community is at the heart of teaming and teaming is at the heart of workplace collaboration. And collaboration is where we find innovation and operational excellence, by tapping into knowledge at the source: from one functional group to another; from one business unit to another; and from one company to another – as partners in a distributed valued chain.
Finally, management needs to view collaborative social networking differently. As Morten T. Hansen notes, in his excellent new book, Collaboration, they must oversee the adoption process and change culture to achieve positive results.
To some degree, every aspect of information technology is in transition: cloud, virtualization, collaboration, and consumerization. CEOs want more and CFOs want to spend less. I could go on and on with challenges for the CIO. But what about the people who actually use all this technology, day after day, to get their jobs done? What are they telling us about how they want to work?
The millennials, the largest presence in the workforce, are already “black belts” in virtual communications and collaboration.Read more...
So says this rather extra positive report in the Economic Times:
Global consultancy firms Accenture, Deloitte, banks StanChart and Barclays and Indian IT giant Infosys all have announced hiring plans that would see the creation of at least 13,000 jobs in India by the end of next year.
Interesting discussion about gender disparity in the Indian workplace. The funny thing is, in the large unorganized sector which accounts for more than 90% of the workforce, the Indian woman is present - and their strength is being leveraged by self-help groups and other civil action bodies. Maybe it's time for corporate India to take some pointers from them?
Excerpts from the article:
Women indeed seem to be getting to that goal of parity at least in the huge organisations headed by Ms Nooyi & Ms Kochar. Ms Nooyi revealed that 30% of PepsiCo’s global workforce are women, and Ms Kochhar noted that 26% of ICICI’s 40,000 employees are women, 80% of them below 30 years of age and for whom ICICI has provisions for maternity and child rearing leave.
Mr Ghosn said that in 1995 Nissan had 1% women in the workforce and today it has risen to 5% women working in all verticals.” But Mr Seth persisted in averring that equality had to be taken in totality, with womens’ contribution and impact being judged not only by their presence and experience in the workplace.
But who says the road to gender parity is smooth anywhere? When a woman employee at PepsiCo asked for six months leave to take care of her ailing mother, Ms Nooyi had to come up with a creative solution. “When we distributed her work to other employees,” recounted Ms Nooyi, “they resented it.” And when Mr Ghosn contended that there should be paternity leave for male employees even as he echoed the need for more women in workforce, Ms Nooyi snapped, “Provided they actually stay at home and take care of the child!”
Interesting article in the WSJ how social technologies can help tap into and be aware of an organization's expertise systems.
To date, most such systems are centrally managed efforts, and that's a problem. The typical setup identifies and catalogs experts in a searchable directory or database that includes descriptions of the experts' knowledge and experience, and sometimes links to samples of their work, such as research reports.
But there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts.
Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts' "softer" qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn't easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries.
The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.
Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.
I've already interviewed Sanjay Sathe once last year, and that was at a time when RiseSmart was trying to establish its own JobConcierge service for senior management.
RiseSmart is now trying to establish an outplacement service too.
When it recently got $ 4.6 million in VC funding it seemed like a good time to catch up with Sanjay again and to understand what is in the future for RiseSmart.
Here are Sanjay's answers to some questions I sent to him via email:
1. What is RiseSmart planning to do with the latest VC funding?
At this point we’ve proven the business model of our outplacement solution, RiseSmart Transition Concierge, and it’s time to grow market share. So we’re going to expand our sales team while continuing to invest in operations and client service.
It’s really been remarkable that we’ve been able to walk into Fortune 500 companies and win their outplacement business away from longtime, and in some cases deeply entrenched, incumbents. We’ve done it time and again. This reinforces our belief in our vision — that our way of doing outplacement will become the dominant model in the future. If we use the investment from Norwest Venture Partners and Storm Ventures wisely, we’ll be well on our way to making this vision a reality.
2. How is the new strategic direction being received by existing clients?
Nothing has changed for existing clients of our consumer service, RiseSmart Job Concierge. What’s changed is our marketing strategy. When we launched, we planned to build a B2C offering to compete with TheLadders — and we believe our service is a better value than TheLadders. But TheLadders is spending millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, and the consumer market in general is crowded, so the investment required to cut through the clutter and build a brand is high.
With RiseSmart Transition Concierge, on the other hand, we are dealing with a smaller universe of prospective clients and the noise level is a lot lower. Corporate clients are hearing the facts and connecting with our message. As a result, we’re bringing thousands of jobseekers into our system much more cost-effectively than by trying to reach them individually through a broad-based ad campaign. And because satisfaction levels have been very high among users, we can count on reaching new B2C customers through word of mouth.
3. What are the biggest challenges that a firm like RiseSmart faces?
Any upstart company faces challenges in going up against the big players and old guard. Outplacement is a $3 plus billion industry, so the entrenched players have a lot to protect; they have been enjoying very nice margins for a long time. Now, we are threatening to permanently reduce the cost structure of the industry, and they don’t like it. We expect them to throw the kitchen sink at us from a sales and marketing perspective as we continue to win away their clients. But we enjoy a good challenge.
4. What other players in the industry are you watching very closely - and with respect :-) ?
We watch the traditional players like Right Management and Lee Hecht Harrison closely — and we do respect them for all they’ve accomplished. They built this industry. We’re just ready to take the baton and move things forward. We expect our competitors to adapt and to begin offering services similar to ours — but we’re confident they won’t be able to do it as well, and certainly not at our price point.
5. What should job seekers do to land jobs of their choice?
The most important thing is to use your time wisely. You had a routine in your job that filled your days — and now that is gone, like a rug pulled out from under you. How do you fill all those hours?
What you shouldn’t do is sit in front of your computer searching different job boards for hours at a time. It’s a time filler that can make you feel productive, but it’s not a good use of your time. This is particularly true because job boards are notoriously inefficient — how many times have you searched for “executive” jobs and wound up reading job descriptions for executive assistants, for example?
That’s why our Job Concierge service — which is not only our B2C offering but also the core of Transition Concierge — is so valuable. We do the online searching for you so you can focus on tasks that are more important, like leveraging social networks, sharpening your resume, crafting custom cover letters, and networking at industry and professional events. This is the smarter route to finding a new job.
This is just an administrative post :-)
I realised that the focus of this blog has moved from purely HR to aspects in the new way of working within Organizations - that impact organizational design, structure, systems, tools, processes and development.
Hence thought that a name change was in order :-)
Hence my moniker for this New Way of Working is Organizations 2.0 - focussing on how people, communities and companies are integrating this new approach to working :-)
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