The Future of Collaboration

Cisco has just completed a five part series on their vision of the future of collaboration. Here are their predictions:

1. Collaborative networks will be to Enterprises what social networks are to Consumers. The rigidly structured silos will give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities of experts. Companies will rely on "collaboration networks" that bring together "clusters of experts" to get critical projects completed. The groups will form dynamically to achieve the shared outcome. The cycle is self-organizing. Experts are drawn to projects, rather than assigned, and thus are motivated.
2. It is not about "on-premise" versus "on-demand", it will be all about the user experience. Ultimately, user experience is what matters. Going forward the "where" in collaboration will become less important
3. Innovation will be redefined by Operational Excellence. Traditionally it was assumed that long term success was driven by either innovation or operational excellence. Today organizations need to do both and collaboration is a critical element that allows that to happen.
4. Organizations without boundaries will drive the next wave of productivity. Business processes must encompass people outside the organization as readily as they do people inside.
5. Information technology will evolve into information fabric. Too much unsorted information is worse than having no information at all. People need to have the right information at the right time, connecting communities that can improve the relevance, and accelerating decisions to drive value for the business. Business architecture must be seamlessly merged with technology architecture.

Obviously in identifying these predictions Cisco has focused on technology. Do they apply beyond technology? Absolutely.

Unfortunately, old habits are hard to break. Look at any organization that has recently gone through a "restructuring." Did the restructuring build the foundation for collaboration networks or did it create new silos? What would an organization look like that would build that foundation.

Could such an organization incorporate employees and non-employees? Or, is the employee the concept that is outdated. Could businesses be redefined to be small centers of mission and principle ready to draw people in who might earn their living being the expert on multiple projects. Could organizations grow and shrink in moments to meet changing demands without creating devastation in the community?

Its an exciting world, isn't it?

Three Assumptions Leaders Should Question

John Baldoni, HarvardBusiness.org, wrote in response to Gary Hamel's "Moon Shots for Management" that he felt it was appropriate to question some underlying management assumptions. He identifies three:

1. It is important for organizations to set firm goals. Unreached goals can frustrate an organization rather than helping it to succeed. Maurice Schweitzer
2. Quick wins are essential to managers in transition. This has been demonstrated in a study by Mark Van Burren and Todd Salferstone to do more harm than good.
3. Senior leaders believe in their CEOs. A study by Booz & Company found that 46% of senior managers surveyed doubted their CEOs ability to navigate the current crisis.

I believe organizations operating in today's environment need to have a clear understanding of what business they are in and beyond that a simple set of guiding principles can be enough to move day-to-day decisions.

Its interesting how often the winner of a race is not in the lead during the early stages. To me that relates to quick wins. You can use up your resources and capacity focusing on early wins when you will need them for the end run.

The lack of belief in senior managers comes from the lack of collaborative leadership, even though it has been shown to be effective. There is still an overwhelming tendency of CEOs to think they can be the hero leader, guiding their troops out of harms way. Information is hidden. Authority is withheld. The easiest way to see this in an organization is to watch what happens when the CEO is not available. If the organization stalls it will be because no one but the CEO is able to make the decisions that would keep it moving forward. Can an organization like that be successful in today's environment?

World Domination and Me

I recently read Chris Guillebeau's "Brief Guide to World Domination" and found it insightful and engaging. If you haven't read it, do. It is 29 pages of "kick in the butt." Do you need that? I don't know, but if you are living a life that is "average" you probably do. Here are the things in an average life according to Chris:

1. Accept what people tell you at face value
2. Don't question authority
3. Go to college because you're supposed to and not because you want to learn something
4. Go overseas once or twice in your life to somewhere safe like England
5. Don't try to learn another language; everyone else will eventually learn English
6. Think about starting your own business, but never do
7. Think about writing a book, but never do
8. Get the largest mortgage you qualify for and spend 30 years paying for it
9. Sit at a desk 40 hours a week for an average of 10 hours of productive work
10. Don't stand out or draw attention to yourself
11. Jump through hoops. Check off boxes.

Are you feeling uncomfortable. They make you think, don' they? But it must be hard not to be average, so many people are. Actually I think Chris would argue that it's not hard to be better than average because so many people are average. His solution is to ask yourself the "two most important questions in the universe:"

1. What do you really want to get out of life?
2. What can you offer the world that no one else can?

If you didn't have to do the things you currently have to do what would you do? And, secondly, since life is not all about you, what can you do to improve the lives of others? How can you do what you would do if you could and improve the lives of others? Chris' recommendation is to find out and then do it. You'll face opposition from gatekeepers, critics, and the widespread acceptance of mediocrity - but Chris has recommendations on how to succeed.

In the final analysis he says:

1. "You don't have to live your life the way other people expect you to
2. The world is waiting for you to figure out what only you can contribute. Take as much time as you need to find the answer, and then get started on it."

If you needed permission, now you have it. Be better than average. Achieve world domination.

Words and phrases that I like

During all my reading I come across new phrases or word connections that really make a connection for me. Sometimes it is the name of a process that I was unaware of - like "Open Space". Sometimes it is just a way of stating something - like "Collective Creativity" (Ed Catmull, Pixar Animation). I've decided to start saving them here. When I run across a new one I will come back and edit this post and add it.

These are the triggers that often start me down a path of exploration. Future blogs cover what I learn along the way.

1. Open Space. Harrison Owen. A way of encouraging and supporting self-organizing.
2. Appreciative Inquiry. Asset based assessment.
3. Collective Creativity. Ed Catmull. A continuous process of small and constant change involving a large number of diverse people working together to respond to multiple opportunities.
4. Systemic inventive thinking. Genrich Altschuller. Brainstorming doesn't work because people withhold their best ideas. Instead, break down successful products and processes into components, study the parts and find other potential uses.
5. Open Innovation. Authentically involving all aspects of an organization in the innovation process and ensuring that the process is shared in an open and accessible way.
6. Disruptive uncertainty. Jeanne Liedtke. Organizations deal with disruptive uncertainty to a large extent through collaboration - collaboration among organizations.
7. Black Swans. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Unanticipated events.
8. Disruptive innovation. Dr. Clayton Christensen. A business model that brings to market a much more affordable product or service that is much simpler to use.
9. Predictably irrational (Dan Ariely)
   
10. More to come.

Focus = Simplify (An analogy)

In a discussion with a colleague she gave a simple analogy for maintaining focus that I really like. When you start a project you have a goal in mind - you are like a bus with the destination posted on the front. If it is an exciting and innovative project, as it evolves, people come along and want to bring their project or ideas and join yours.

Some of these projects and ideas have the same destination as yours and some have one that is different. For the ones with the same destination, invite them onto the bus and look for the ways that you can grow each others capacity. For the ones with a different destination, acknowledge the different destination and encourage them to proceed and look for other partners.

Don't change your destination without overwhelming justification and don't turn your bus into a boat. If you do, you will generally find that you don't reach either destination.

Notes from March MLab Management 2.0 LabNotes

Tim Brown, CEI, IDEO

• At IDEO – management is tolerated insofar as it is a means to the end of facilitating what people want to do, rather than the other way around.
• Key to our culture is an absolutely incessant interest in doing things that are new.
• Choose employees with deep craft who are also keenly curious about the context surrounding it.
• The pattern of innovation in emergent, not planned
• Creative culture has a deep reservoir of trust in its DNA
• The real question about scale is not about sharing information – it is about sharing inspiration.

Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies

• The higher the quality of employee you have, in terms of capability, enablement, engagement, the better value gets created in the interface between the employee and the customer.
• Reverse accountability – managers are accountable to their employees
• For any complaint or query an employee opens a service ticket on a portal to which the department is obliged to respond. Crucially, it is only the employee who can close the ticket.

Jeffrey Hollender, CEO, Seventh Generation

• In every deliberation, it behoves to consider the impact of the decision on the next seven generations.
• Extreme transparency. That inspired us to look at everything we were doing and put on our website anything critical that might be missing that anyone would want to know.

The World Beyond Budgeting, Robin Fraser and Franz Roosli

• Radical decentralization is the underlying concept. The organization revolves around the customer. Principles of the beyond budgeting model:
• Devolved Leadership principles

1. Focus everyone on their customers, not on hierarchical relationships
2. Organize as a lean network of accountable teams, not as centralized functions
3. Give teams the freedom and capability to act, don’t micro-manage them
4. Create a high responsibility culture at every level, not just at the top
5. Promote open information for self management; don’t restrict it hierarchically
6. Adopt a few clear values, goals, and boundaries, not detailed regulations
   

Adaptive Process Principles

1. Set relative goals for continuous improvement, don’t negotiate contracts
2. Reward shared success based on relative performance, not fixed targets
3. Make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not a top down annual event
4. Base controls on relative indicators and trends, not variances against plan
5. Make resources available as needed, not through annual budget allocations
6. Coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual planning cycles

Engaged Innovation Roundtable, London Business School

• Tim Thorne, Royal Bank of Scotland: Five days of innovation training for employees. Develop ideas some of which then receive funding. 50% of those that received funding have entered the marketplace.
• Amanda West of ThomsonReuters: A supporting online toolkit and series of webinars about innovation enable staff globally across the business to build their own skills on a self serve basis
• Tod Bedilion, Roche: Put internal problems on an internal system and waited for solutions. Our hope that our internal technology-oriented people would gravitate to using this type of tool was completely unfounded… We really had to push people (via an electronic marketing campaign) to involve them in suggesting solutions. Had to offer incentives in the end.
• Thought triggered for MSU: Could alumni be involved in “innovative engagement” through technology? Would this create an institutional value for alumni. By innovative engagement I’m thinking of a system that would enable alums to post challenges that other alums could suggest solutions for? What would the incentives be? Access to knowledge?

Seven Rules for Radical Innovators, Lessons from Barack Obama’s campaign, Umar Haque, Director, Havas Media Lab

1. Have a self organizing design. Obama’s organization blew past orthodoxies for structure to use the power of self-organizing
2. Minimize strategy. Obama’s campaign realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.
3. Maximize purpose. Yesterday we built huge corporations to do tiny incremental things – tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.
4. Broaden unity. Marketers typically segment and target, Obama succeeded through unification, not through division.
5. Thicken power. True power is the power to inspire, lead, and engender belief.
6. There is nothing more asymmetrical – more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative - than the world changing power of an ideal.
7. Rule six is the starting point for tomorrow’s radical innovators. Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing? What ideals will you fight and struggle for

Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 Book List

• Creative Experience, Mary Parker Follett, 1924
• Out of Control, Kevin Kelly, 1994
• The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner, 1996
• Manufacturing the Employee, Roy Jacques, 1996
• Competing on the Edge, Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt, 1998
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, 1999
• Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, David Weinberger, 2002
• The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, 2002
• The Future of Work, Thomas Malone, 2004
• The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, 2004
• Firms of Endearment, Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth, and David Wolfe, 2007
• Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, 2008

If you are inspired to read all of any of the articles go to www.managementlab.org

America's Racial Contract

Charles Mills, PhD
Northwestern

A racial contract is a conceptual metaphor for our philosophy for dealing with each other. The problem is that it is a philosophy vased on white Europeon thought. It asserts:

• We are all equal
• The law treats us all equal
• The government governs equally/no exploitation
• There is transparency in treatment of people
• There is objectivity in threatment of people

John Rawls book, A Theory of Justice, originated the "veil of ignorance" principle which accepted the conceptual metaphor as fact. It was first published in 1971. The claim was that a society is a coopeerative venture for mutual advantage, regulated by rules, that benefits everyone. This assumption was fundamentally flawed.

The conceptual framing for the US portrays racism as an anomoly. Much relied on work of Immanuel Kant and John Locke who on the surface appear to support equality. Deeper research identifies significant racial overtones in their writings.

Mills argues that what we have is not a social contract but a racial contract. We need to accept that and look at how to dismantle the racial contract if we want to procede. Today, there is less individual racism but the system of structural and institutional racism sustains racism. One of his arguments is the systemic white advantage of wealth. As the $9 trillion in wealth is passed down in the next few years it will be passed from whites to whites and thus will sustain white preference. Mills argues that wealth disparity is a connection to the past and, as such, carries forward the racism of the past.

Mills suggests that to create change the interests of African Americans have to converge with the interests of whites. He feels the most likely place for this to occur is between people of color and the working class whites. Income for working class people in the US has been stagnant since the 70's.

Immigration and Anti-immigration

I had the pleasure of hearing a presentation yesterday by Dr. Evelyn Hu-DeHart,
Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA), Brown University, about America's love/hate relationship with newcomers. Today several hundred high school students jointed in the conference and were present for this talk. Here are some key points:

• America's immigration "story" has always implied an inclusive, welcoming country. "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to be free."
• The reality has been one of exclusion - except for Europeans.
• The main reason we have sought out immigrants over the years is for their labor...first the African slaves, then Asians, and finally Mexicans.
• Slaves were excluded from citizenship because they were "property". The first US Naturalization Law in 1790 only allowed citizenship for white immigrants. Asians were specifically named as excluded in the first immigration law in 1882.
• I wasn't certain of the date but I think early 20th century Asians were described as "aliens ineligible for citizenship."
• Mexicans were really interesting. Until the 1950's the US Census counted Mexicans as "white". Before the depression they could move freely back and forth across the US Mexican border. The depression resulted in Mexicans being rounded up and deported. After WWII Mexican labor was again needed and a formal agreement brought Mexicans back to work in the US but re-classified them as non-white without citizenship. The term "illegal immigrant" was coined to describe those workers who built a life in the US and wanted to stay.
• Racial restrictions on immigration were finally changed in 1965 but new restrictions were imposed on numbers of immigrants by category. We can argue, for example, that Mexicans should go home and use the legal immigration process to come back into the US. However, many of the Mexican workers who come here work in the unskilled service industry and the quota for unskilled workers in the current immigration law is 5,000 worldwide and last year two of those positions were allocated to Mexico. This, in spite of the fact that there are 12 million Mexican immigrants in the US - and half of them are undocumented.
• It is only recently that the term "illegal alien" has been applied to immigrants. It is today's version of "alien ineligible for citizenship". Alien has connotations of hostile, suspect, and evil that only serve a political purpose.

I hope I got all the facts right. Actually Dr. Hu-DeHart was so interesting I will be doing some reading on the history of immigration to get it all straight in my mind. Once again, it was a wonderful presentation and a terrific opportunity to participate in a valuable learning experience.

Health Care and Communities of Color

I'm writing this morning out of frustration, not at any individual, but at one of my "communities". The James Madison College here at MSU is putting on its 6th national conference on Race in 21st Century America. The general topic this year is Health Care and Communities of Color. This is of interest to me because nutrition is such an important component of people's health and there are such great disparities in health between people of different races and ethnicity.

The opening keynote for the conference was delivered by Dr. Jocelyn Elders. Dr. Elders was Surgeon General of the US during the Clinton presidency. She was the first African American to hold that post and she was the first Surgeon General to use the post as a "bully pulpit" to promote prevention. She was the first Surgeon General I ever knew existed. She spoke at 1:00pm in the auditorium at the Kellogg Center. My frustration came from the fact that I was one of about 75 people to attend.

Then I went on to a panel discussion with three distinguished scholars who were also African American. Dr. Darren Davis, University of Notre Dame, Dr. Bill Larson, University of Memphis, and Dr. Clarence Lusane, American University. Their topic was Race and the 2008 Presidential Election and their presentation and discussion was enlightening and challenging. Two political scientists and a distinguished philosopher, talking about the most fascinating election in history. Unfortunately, I was among less than 50 people in attendance.

This is something I have noticed since I joined the university community five years ago - long term members in the community don't seem to value the benefits of belonging. Certainly the opportunity to be challenged by other scholars, to ask questions about other viewpoints, and to be on the cutting edge knowledge should be a perk. But when I go to presentations, too often I feel like "that guy". I'm the one person in the room who nobody knows. I'm the only person out of my element. People like Dr. Elders, who should draw standing room crowds are lucky to fill a few rows. That's frustrating.

Here's a bit of what I came away with.

I was fascinated by the fact that even after all these years away from the Surgeon General post, Dr. Elders is an expert at talking in sound bites. She used anagrams quite often. She started off reminding us all that she was the first Surgeon General who publicly admitted that, yes, Americans have sex. AIDS was growing and her first anagram of the day was A B C D.

• Abstinence
• Be Faithful
• Condoms (latex)
• Do other things

She said it was the "Do other things" that got her in so much trouble that she finally lost the position. She pointed out that now, African Americans are 14% of the population but have 50% of the HIV. Later in questions she also pointed out that African Americans only make up 3% of the doctors in the US in spite of being 14% of the population. She talked about our sick care system and our need for a health care system. She pointed out the three "simple" goals that she put forth in 1985:

1. Improve quality of health for all Americans
2. Reach 100% access to health care
3. Reach 0% disparity in health care

Among other comments along the way was that 25% of girls 15 - 19 have a sexually transmitted disease and the mind numbing statistic that infant mortality in Detroit is 25%.

Dr. Elders gave us five "c"s for leadership

1. Clarity of vision
2. Commitment
3. Consistency
4. Concern
5. Control

She also shared a tale that was relayed to her early in her fight for change:

• When you're dancing with a bear, you have to keep dancing until the bear gets tired.

For Dr. Elders fixing the education system is the key to fixing health care.

Then I went on the the panel on the 2008 Presidential Election. Dr. Davis suggested that the election was not about race. He stated:

1. Obama ran a de-racialized campaign - what he had to do to secure support
2. Obama became an exception to the rule - even people with negative beliefs about African Americans could support Obama because they could declare him an exception - Harvard education, multiracial, Hawaiian birth, etc.
3. Obama did a good job of reminding people that America is about equality and since Whites believe that they are not racist that encouraged their support for a person of color.
4. Most whites did not vote for Obama

Dr. Lawson talked about Obama's focus on colorblindness - his focus was on not using race in public policy. Dr. Lawson feels that this will hurt people of color down the road. He feels that Obama overstates the case that things have changed. There are some disparities that can only be solved by taking a racial approach - not a colorblind approach. Now it will be more difficult to impose programs that include color conscious policies.

Dr. Lusane felt race was significant in the campaign. Obama won because:

1. He had a compelling message - change
2. He had a compelling strategy - most significant was the decision to go after all 50 states since - because of the work of Jesse Jackson and others - the Democratic Party does not hold winner take all primaries - delegates are split based on the results in each state. That meant that even in the states that Obama lost he picked up delegates.
3. He had a compelling biography

Dr. Lusane is looking at the impact on the world. His thesis is that although Obama was de-racialized in the US, the world definitely saw him as a minority, person of color and all the things that implied. That drove their amazement that he could be elected.

I think it was a good day. Don't you?