“When I think about the successes in Silicon Valley, many of the most enduring were business model innovations.”
“Givers motivate themselves to avoid complacency by focusing on the benefits to others if they succeed and worrying about disappointing them if they fail.”
Everything will change, even clothing
One of the most powerful things about enterprise collaboration platforms is their ability to make your company more agile and adaptable. This means that things are going to change and you need to be ok with that. What kind of change are we talking about? Everything has the potential to change ranging from the type of clothing your employees wear to work every day (moving from suits to a more casual style) to your corporate policies to your reporting structure to new roles and titles to how employees are compensated. I’m not saying all of things will change but they can. They key here isn’t to fight back against change but to become more nimble and agile. Don’t be scared to change and know that you are going to have to in order to become successful.
Listening to the voices of social business
Companies with the foresight and know-how to apply [social media] thoughtfully, and with rigor, will be the big winners. A great example is social media’s ability to spur the convergence of brand and culture. It encourages people to integrate their personal and professional personae in ways that lead to new and valuable ideas and work – for the individuals and their organizations. An example of this convergence is a new IBM social website and web service called Voices. Voices is a real-time data service that showcases live social feeds of IBMers who are experts in big data, mobile, social business, cloud, cognitive computing and much more. But it doesn’t end there. Voices then marries the individuals’ thoughts with IBM’s company feeds (@IBM, @SmarterPlanet, @IBMResearch) etc.), as well as a word cloud that shows visitors what’s trending via data visualization technology originating from IBM Research.
via Ethan McCarty, IBM, in wired.com
Poor leadership, technology focus will cause most social business efforts to fall short
- 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve their intended benefits through 2015 due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology .
- The “push” approach that worked for ERP and CRM rollouts won’t work for social applications — people must understand how social will improve work to opt in and become engaged.
- Leaders should tackle the tough cultural challenges head on and early on —more than just sponsorship, leaders need to demonstrate commitment to a more open, transparent work style by their actions.
- By 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will capture and disseminate information through social filtering using Facebook-like networks
- Identifying and understanding the role of key influencers in the social network are will make communication channels more effective.
- In 2017, the majority of all new user-facing applications will exhibit gamified-social-mobile fusion.
Employers’ Social Media Policies Come Under Regulatory Scrutiny
The US National Labor Relations Board has ruled that private organizations cannot ban “disrespectful” posts that criticize the employer if those policies discourage workers from exercising their right to communicate with one another with the aim of improving wages, benefits or working conditions.
However, offensive posts by employees who are venting personal feelings rather than taking concerted action to improve conditions are not protected by federal law.
Via NYTimes.com
Do we really understand why cultures control information-sharing?
As social business advocates we champion information-sharing at work and bemoan cultures that don’t. However, according to recent academic research, there may be good reasons, beyond intellectual property and privacy issues, for people not to share,
An ethnographic study of a bio-informatics team in China looked at practices around sharing software. Sharing data is central to contemporary science, and software is of primary importance to its progress. Accordingly, investigators — from the School of Computer Science at Fudan University in Shanghai and the Human Centered Design & Engineering department at the University of Washington in Seattle — to understand the tension between sharing and control within an emerging discipline that merges biology with IT.
A fishing pole instead of a fish
One of their findings relates to internal practices. For example, members of a team write their own code, or script, in the course of their work. But instead of posting it online for all team members to use as needed, they share it only when asked for it. Investigators uncovered good reasons for this practice.
Training junior members of the team has high priority; so faculty and senior researchers need to determine when to share what is already available and when to have students practice coding themselves. Finding answers on the intranet may help scientists-in-training solve an immediate problem. It does not, however, necessarily develop the skills they need to innovate in the future. Hence the use of a “request-and-give” protocol for sharing.
Documentation and peer review
Another finding looks at boundaries to sharing software across the wider scientific community. When submitting an academic paper for review, scientists must also provide documentation, rationale and algorithms for the software they used in their work. In this way the publication of scientific findings is tied to the associated software as part of the peer review process. Proliferation of undocumented software is thereby controlled and the scientific community gains access to software they can trust and use.
So, what is the purpose of this non-judgmental way of looking at sharing versus control? For the authors of this study it’s the way to create better social software. Do you think their findings apply to social software in business settings? And if so, to what extent?
It Doesn’t Pay For Your Employees to be Workaholics When it comes to the 24/7 working culture in the U.S., employees may be their own worst enemy according to Leslie A. Perlow, the Konosuke Matsushita professor of leadership at Harvard Business School. Perlow conducted some research involving a team of high-powered, workaholic consultants to see if they could disconnect after working hours and also discover the results of their decisions.
The key to her research was committing as a team. With the joint effort to solidify time off, the consultants communicated more, supported one another, and held each other accountable for connecting after working hours.
Social recognition or perks: Which is a better incentive in the workplace?
How the Wikipedia community is attempting to change its culture and demographics with better experiences for new editors, especially women, through the “Teahouse.”
(via Crafting Positive New User Experiences on Wikipedia | Follow the Crowd)
