Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Should CHROs be in charge of innovation?

I argued in a recent article that the Chief People Officer needed to own the organization’s automation strategy. The idea was to contribute to the company’s growth capacity while compensating for the inevitable cost cutting that the first wave of IPA will bring about. However, he should not walk alone: to succeed in this endeavour, he should also leverage Talent and L&D strategies to favour innovation.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Learning, beyond digital

Corporate Investment in L&D has been growing at double digits for five years and seems poised to continue. However, the results of these investments are strongly challenged. To increase its impact, L&D must reinvest in its own talent.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Should your Chief People Officer have an automation strategy?

Work automation is happening, and it is happening fast. It holds potential for efficiencies and reliability on the one hand, but also for new jobs and new ways of working. And therefore, the Chief People Officer should be given the task to craft a work automation strategy. Sounds like a paradox? Not as much as some would like to think, if we take the time to understand the different technologies involved and the two types of outcomes that are possible.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

The death and rebirth of social business

Social business was dead ... and it has been born again as social media management systems. The question is, apart from VCs, who stands to gain from this transfiguration?

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

CEO agenda for 2014 : build the management dashboard for your soon-to-be digital organization

The digital technologies that are slowly invading each step in the value chain of our corporations will transform what it means to lead and to manage them. Incumbent leaders would do well to take a deep, hard look at how digital technologies are transforming their corporation and then understand what new breed of talent they should develop to master this revolution.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Explosive delegation

Why delegation has its dangers and a higher level of collaboration is the future of organizations

Friday, August 16, 2013

The context of context

Is context really king ? I remember reading that in one of Brian Solisblogposts. Only it wasn't really true. Context might be the new lie. I have been thinking about the context of context ever since having that intuition during a Google+ conversation in the Conversation Community. I have tried to put my thoughts together, and it has proven more difficult than expected. 

Social is about context. About context beeing king and about technology being a context enhancing engine (from an individual point of view) as well as a context leveraging engine (from a business point of view). And therefore, at first sight, about a need or an opportunity for people and institutions alike to master context and act in real time. 

Only, after thinking about it, social is not solely about context: by changing the depth of our personal context, technological (and social) evolution is making the changing nature of responsibility and decision making visible.

Context has context and context needs to be managed, which is why Responsible Context Management might just become an imperative management practice in the next few years. 

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Why "Tweet" and "Like" are primitive social actions

Social technologies are not mature. They are a primitive multi-layered bunch of technologies, that are clumsily integrating with each other, while also integrating with and changing our individual and collective thinking and communication habits and skills. They will probably change the very nature of what it means to communicate. And someday, we will forget that they are a technology altogether ...

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Professional communities and the pace of time


Acceleration, by Hartmund Rosa, should be compulsory reading in business school, and it was actually recommended to me by the CEO of a client.

Hartmund Rosa defines three causes for acceleration, technological acceleration, social change acceleration and acceleration of the pace of life. These are major trends, and even though they are some times softened by havens or deceleration (relative deceleration), they are trends that corporations need to cope with to compete in an increasingly social market (I am using compete in a positive way, like in compete to provide the best customer experience ...).

Put it in another way, leaders must ensure their company moves faster than any other if they are to survive.

But acceleration is also, and foremost, a dangerous trend. I tend to think of it alongside other trends like the second economy or the third economy. It is already producing some frightening results, and the existing business mindset, without deep changes, will only make things worse.

There is reason to be optimistic though. Michael Fauscette writes in Enterprise Irregulars that community building is the major initiative for 2013, in the social technology field. This is important. Because communities are one of the few spaces where time is deep. In fact, communities can accelerate time around them while providing a slow conversation space, a somehow protected environment, where relationships, genuine caring, subject interest, shared responsibility, mutual trust, provide the virtual equivalent of the ancient British Clubs ... Communities are the new people-centric environments, where people have the possibility to reclaim mastery of time.

Which reminds me of a great insight from my friend Alain Garnier, "social technologies are moving the focus of work from space to time".

What I am more concerned about is how companies will manage to develop the community managers (I prefer host or owner, or the French "animateur") in their existing HR processes. The only answer I have today, I have called it unleadeship.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

The year we kill social business

Social Business (or #socbizz in Twitter) has reached buzzword status. If you want to live by the ambitions that were behind it, you probably need to kill it.