Talent, work and technology

Social business in 2012 : the threats from within

2012-01-18T10:42:00.002Z

I have been going through some of the predictions for the 2012 Social Business Year (for instance, here, here). It is clear from these and other predictions that the potential of Social Business to transform our corporations has been widely covered, so I thought I would concentrate on the two or three threats that I see lurking over social business delivering all its promises

What is social Business ?

I am sure that there are countless definitions of social businesses, and it is important, in this post, to state what I understand by that : continuous (and with increased speed) adoption by corporations of new social trends (individualized consumption describes it well, in The Support Economy), through new social technologies and, slowly, emergence of a new social role for the corporation, this impacting and transforming its nature as a joint stock, limited liability, profit focused institution.

The threats from within, 1: too much power

I have seen the guys leading E2.0 initiatives become very popular within their own company and even more outside it. This is a dangerous position, because corporations are still political beings, and there will be adversaries arising from other functions or corporate initiatives and working to have the E2.0 guys brought back to their initial influence level.

Remember, if you are to succeed, and before the CEO becomes the explicit sponsor of your drive to transform into a social business, you need some political clout and much seniority in the team. Because initial success you will have, and followers you will breed ! Established structures (middle management, other leaders, some functions) will see you as their particular enemy and will try to bring you down.

My point here is not "they are wrong, you are right so go on with it". My point is, social business and E2.0 is all very well, but you'd better prove some business benefits quickly. And not, let's be clear, by bringing in some intelligent slideware from consultants (I am a consultant, disclaimer), but by achieving results trough some of the key assets that social business is supposed to build in a corporation, like renewed engagement, improved business intelligence, market influence, and, someday, increased consumer benefit.

It might happen that you'll have to work strongly to defend your own ideas of what "customer benefit" is though ...

The threats from within, 2: the new normal

What happens if you avoid the political trap ? There is this very normal trend of some teams that manage social business or enterprise 2.0. within their company, when they start to reach success : we are the ones who know about this stuff, so you should now adopt the new ways ! Enterprise 2.0 is the new normal !

That is human nature ! For folks that have been battling to see their beliefs adopted by their companies, basking in their own success and popularity, when they reach it, should be seen as normal.

Well, it isn't. Social Business is about adopting permanent change as the new normal (see how Fast Company describes the Generation Flux). It is why, after the principles and practices of Social Business for a particular company are strong enough (meaning that they are effectively adopted), I would suggest having the team prepare to move on to operations and let another team reinterpret what the former one did, and bring in its new ideas, views on technology and on strategy.

The key question is, how is the team in place going to bring in the next ones ? Well, it might just have to reinvent some HR practices, like L&D or talent management, and also go into tough personal mindset evolution. Now, that would be something

Beyond Social: Talent Management as Strategy

2011-12-17T21:42:00.000Z

My friends at SuccessFactors just became part of SAP ... So, after Oracle, it's SAP. And, as Michael Fauscette says, it might soon be Microsoft: Leading enterprise software vendors seem to have started consolidating the cloud specialists. This, after all, is just capitalism ... I am more worried that, in so doing, it is also the process specialists consolidating the social specialists. If so, it is both a huge threat to innovation and transformation but also an opportunity for the best managed and led companies: for companies that understand that the future organization will succeed or fail at the individual level.

The moment of choice

Beyond established vendors consolidating cloud specialists, what I see in the SAP move is an incumbent buying a small player that was just beginning to understand how to complement process with social. The incumbent, by the way, has made its business by helping improve its clients' control over their processes (I did not say improve process performance nor overall performance, though).

The trends seem rather strong. It's the "social enabling" of processes or the "context-aware computing" that Salesforce.com, Qontext or Forrester are talking about. It's the vision that, if we are to find any ROI in E2.0, social business or social technology, why not start where the ROI is best calculated ? If I say "social enabling" processes, the social business sale became easier, all of a sudden...

Is it the vision, if I push the logic to the end, that social technologies should integrate the corporation framework as it stands today ? Should being collaborative mean being collaborative within the existing organization, not touching at its deep structure ? Not touching accounting, finance, key processes, organization design nor the command and control mindset ?

Well, this is definitely an option, but it's not the most engaging one. I had been thinking, all these years, that social technologies had the potential to dramatically improve the corporate organization by bringing the individual person at the center of it ... It's what I understood by the much heralded "people-centered" corporation vision ... If "people-centered corporation" boils down to putting my social profile in my process work ...

And yet, the vision above is not the only option. There is another option, another path, which is a bit more frightening for it is less trodden ... In this alternative option, social technologies are adopted, but not to reinforce the existing organization, they are adopted as a means for the corporation to engage its clients, partners and other stakeholders in creative conversations, distributed design projects and social value oriented production ventures. In their book "The Support Economy", Soshana Zuboff and James Maxmin talk about moving the focus of collaboration from the organization space to the individual space.

This is a time of choice, because depending on how they are adopted, social technologies will reinforce the current structure of the organization, or they will allow a reinvention of this structure, which I think is needed to answer the unmet social and individual needs around us.

As many authors and bloggers have been writing about lately, there seem to be a need for corporations to change their focus from stuff to better (borrowing an idea from Umar Haque) or from things to individuation (as Zuboff and Maxmin argue). There is definitely a demand for "better", for "value", for "meaning", which for instance appears in the #ows movements, the Arab Spring or the Moscow riots ... It also appears in green consumption, anti-consumption or other alternative, sustainable consumption movements. These, by the way, can take some lessons from historical precedents, like the anti-consumption movement that brought about the American Revolution.

Time of talent

How do you get from building things intended for mass consumption to contributing to the improvement of the individual life of your clients ? And how do social technologies come into play ?

My experience today is that many individual employees are ready to drive the change that is needed here. Still, employees have little power in corporations, they belong within their BUs and processes and just contribute to the organization. Goals and strategies are built at executive level and driven by the market pressure. And existing processes are made to deliver on those goals and strategies. It is why I think, if "social enabling" of processes just means bringing social into processes without fundamentally challenging the business goal and vision, no real innovation will come of it. Individual employees will have no autonomy to develop new approaches to their client demand even though they might have been able to do it in another context.

Context. I think that is the promise of social technologies. If, instead of bringing social into processes, social technologies are adopted in such a way that every individual has access to all human and organizational assets of the corporation, he is in a position to make contextualized decisions that answer to the needs of his clients. Let's take an example : if I am an associate at a P&C insurer, managing a claim, I will certainly have the opportunity to engage in a conversation about insurance with this client, because this is precisely the context where he is the most open to listening about insurance covers and about risks. Such a conversation is relevant to my client and will drive its engagement. It all boils down to how I, as a claim associate, manage this contextual situation.

In this conversation, I might learn that my client is indeed an interesting client, that he belongs in a small community that has a very precise insurance need. And I might want to cover that insurance need by engaging my own product teams in the conversation.

As a claims professional, what do I need to be able to do this ? At least three things : I need the systems to give me all relevant information about the client; I need to have been developed so as to be able to lead an adapted conversation and make educated decisions; and then, I need to be recognized and rewarded for the activities I just performed, meaning claim management, client relation and product development. Waouh ! But that's not possible in an insurance company ! Or is it ?

From a systems point of view, it is possible to imagine that I have access to all relevant information given through both systems of records and systems of engagement. In fact, our problem about adopting social technologies is not a systems problem. It's a mindset problem.

From a Learning & Development point of view, I need to have been developed so as to be able to make decisions:

based on the vision, mission and social engagement of my company,
"augmented" by the company assets and people I have access to
depending on the context of my client
willing to respond to my client implicit demand, regardless of the product or services that I am used to selling

That is a huge development program that I need to have gone through. In fact, as far as I know, it is a program that most likely turns conventional training wisdom upside down.

Let's get to the most important point of view, the organizational one. The company needs to manage me (recognize, reward, connect) in such a way that I can move accross what today would be perceived as functional or hierarchical silos. How managers are developed and how their missions are set needs to take into account this new autonomy from the claims professional; in fact, managers should become organizational facilitators of this autonomy. At the same time, key organizational design basics and people processes must evolve (how positions are described, how power and information flows - look at how my friend Jon describes wirearchy - how people are recognized and rewarded).

From this organizational point of view, we are looking at deep structural change.

I think this is where talent management comes into play. The changes that corporations have to undergo are deep changes. Otherwise, they will not be able to take advantage of the huge business (and social) opportunity that is presented to them, this business opportunity that consists in answering individual aspirations for a better life.

The sheer complexity of the changes at hand makes it imposible to drive classic transformation projects (executives design and decide and managers and associates execute). These projects need to be undertaken as if the final goal had been reached. They will rely on the individual wisdom, skill, sense of responsibility and effort of the people involved. It's deep experimentation taken place within the corporate walls.

Talent management professional should take the risk of launching these new organizational experiments. It will give them a new position in the strategy process of the organization. And no wonder: in an ever faster evolving economy strategy can only be conceived of at the fringes of the organization.

Leveraging social technologies for talent management

2011-11-29T09:49:00.001Z

Reminder: talent management still the key strategic enabler.
As the economy accelerates and decision-making needs to be pushed at the front-line, mostly all managerial (and, increasingly, non-managerial) positions are acquiring strategic importance. At the same time, competition for talent keeps high in most marketplaces.

It is therefore not enough to have a professional and engaged HR team to succeed in attracting, developing, retaining, compensating and, most importantly, engaging the men and women that will drive success of your organization.

The key success factor is to develop a talent management culture that is as stronger (or stronger) than your financial culture. Only when all managers are as experts with HR practices as they are with financial KPIs, and when they are as engaged in driving HR strategy as they are in reaching financial targets, will you have a competitive advantage on the talent market.

This can translate as making talent management your core organizational capability. To start with, a company needs

a strong alignment of your HR strategic goals with your corporate strategic goals;
a data-based, almost scientific approach to talent management.

These are reached by being able to consider all talent management practices as an integrated corporate process, which means being able to identify actors, activities, work in progress and finished products. It is only on top of very well handled process that you can bring human value add.

Working on identifying processes, actors and activities is something the HR team should do. In my experience, it is a great learning opportunity for HR professionals, and it gives a sense of ownership over their own function.

When a clear vision about the HR processes is reached, it is important to engage management in how to improve these HR processes. This is the moment when you engage in talent management skills development in your management team. Even though you might think that most of your managers have their "own" HR expertise, it is important to recognize that success will come from consistency. Otherwise, success will come from chance or over-investment.

Leveraging the social in technologies
In the present times, it is a good idea to lead this project (engaging management on talent management practices) with a community mindset or using social technologies. It quickens the pace of the project and opens new horizons that usually bring important innovations and operational improvements.

Even more importantly, as we see social technologies ROI appearing more clearly (in social enabling processes and in accelerating good practice sharing), such a talent management initiative is also an opportunity to make HR processes more human by social enabling them. There are two dimensions to this "social enabling"

First dimension, bring HR team members and managers closer by implementing either a social network or purposefully built communities;
Second dimension, there is a huge opportunity to innovate on some key HR practices (like recognition or engagement) by professionnally adopting some popular practices in the social media field (or in the web 2.0 environment). For instance, gamification or a badging strategy are helpful to start a project on reinventing engagement and recognition.

The key point here is that these initiatives will deliver their value if they are undertaken within a comprehensive HR strategy. Otherwise, as their potential for disruption is high, the odds are high that these initiatives will be "killed" by HR management.

As I have been thinking lately, 2012 should see the return of strategy (for those teams that have understood social technologies).

OccupyWallStreet and the social/business revolution

2011-10-26T09:06:00.003+01:00

Ten days ago, as I had the opportunity to share some time with people at Liberty Square and assist to one GA, I was inspired by some conversations that defended the following general idea; "we are not here to be violent, we are here to collaborate, to participate in building something different. If the guys leading our banks and financial institutions do not want to participate, fine, we'll change them". As well as by these ideas, I was also struck by the collaborative, participative, shouted model, that has been developed in the GAs. Coming out of the Web2.0Expo, and participating to all these conversations about social media, I found the real life aspect of OccupyWallStreet amazing (videos). And I also found their professionalism, so to speak, very impressive, whether it is in the websites that have been developed and that show quite a mastery of social technologies or the "Direct Democracy & Facilitation Trainings" that are being developed by OccupyTogether.

In Europe, Occupy Wall Street is not getting the attention it deserves. Elsewhere, there has been some analysis of this movement, most of what I have read, by the way, pointing at its shortcomings (here is some perspective by James Marshall Crotty).

From my perspective, this movement is new in the level of internal and external collaboration it shows, and it obviously links to the Jasmine Revolution and the ones that followed. My perspective is that its success or failure will not rest with the protesters ability to make a long stand; this stand needs to be taken into account by leaders, giving way to change in mindsets, and eventually to a transformation of leadership. A leader: someone that leads ... Today, the where and the how are just not clear enough

Occupy Wall Street is a major business, social and political reinvention opportunity. Why is that ? 1. The economy is not providing the kind of prosperity people aspire to and seem ready to build. There is opportunity for a new kind of leadership. 2. The social or web2.0 technologies now deploying across the economy bring with them a mindset that allows fresh economic and business thinking and therefore the achievement of that new prosperity. There is an opportunity for this new leadership to reach its goals.

Optimistic view? Let me explain.

1. The economy, it can be argued, at least in the Western world, seems poised to grow slowly, at best, in the next two to five years. Jobs have been lost, and if you follow W Brian Arthur in this McKinsey Quaterly article, they will not come back. There might be some assets in savings, yes, but where there are savings (like in Europe), it seems that people are not willing to spend what's needed to generate growth.

As for businesses, most of them are unable to provide the products or services that would spur a new surge in growth. That's understandable, at least in the BtoC arena: consumers, hard hit by the debt tornado, do not have a real need for the stuff that's available. I would argue they are waiting for what could be called a new prosperity: improved public services, health care, education, environmental savvy products, people-development activities, ...

Where are the leaders ? How are they responding to these aspirations ? It really surprises me that few business leaders, so far, have started answering the yarn for a new kind of prosperity by offering new services, new products that are in line with what people are voicing (yes, there are real demands, appart from "let the bankers go"). Offering jobs and offering value.

In one of the conversations at the Web2.0Expo, moderated by Cindy Gallop, we stressed how leaders were, in short, lost and frightened. Lost for lack of understanding of what is happening (and you have to admit it is a complex movement, that can only be understood as arising from a perfect storm made of social aspirations, technological progress, democracy progress, ...). Frightened at letting other people take the lead, whether it is for selfish reasons (those exist) or from very legitimate reasons (as a leader, it is difficult to let go when you are not sure that your are making the right decision).

And yet, opportunities are waiting for leaders to discover them. Let me underline some of them that I know well :

There is a need to transform transportation, to cope with a growing complexity of cities and a threatening environmental risk.
There is a a need to transform insurance, to take into account new risks coming from the new fabrics of society (anyone said subprimes ?). The same could be said about banking.
There is a need to make government and public services more agile, so that they provide real value in real time.
There is a huge need to rethink education, and transform it, leveraging the assets of existing systems but also using new ways and technologies.
...

All those, and many others, are opportunities for growth ! Demand is there, whether it is explicit or not. Financing is definitely there, just waiting for a real opportunity. Talent is there ! There are real expectations for meaning, for a sense of self-esteem that would come from the work we do, that could become something more than just "what I do for a living".

Leaders should take these opportunities. It would help navigate and going out of the coming recession; it would engage talent. It would allow them to gain legitimacy and honor in the eyes of society.

The good news is, almost all assets and skills needed to reach goals that were not imaginable yesterday are there to be used. Or read Carlota Perez, if you do not trust me.

2. I mentioned in my last post that social technology was ready to help in changing the world. Technology is important, but most important still is the new mindset that is deploying with it. Just as it took some years for most business leaders to understand the benefits of mass production, it might take some years for this new mindset to reach a tipping point.

This is where I think some work needs to be done by those today operating in the social business / E2.0 / Web2.0 / ... arena. I have been reading these past few months how social technologies were going to help in improving existing processes by "social enabling them". And, behold, we found the ROI that we had been looking for so long ! Right and true. But that is certainly not enough and it is terribly short-sighted !

If used within the current optimization mindset, these technologies will help business at the expense of the individual and therefore society. It is important to remember that corporations are still widely viewed as vehicles for value creation through efficiency. Innovation, in most of them, is just appearing as an alternative for this value creation.

Efficiency is tightly linked, in an established management mindset, to a taylorist view of the world. Do more with less. And, believe me, social technologies have the potential to push us (managers, employees, leaders) where we do not want to go. To the point where every activity in our life can be linked to our work activity, to the point where there is always something else for me to do. CRM ? Not good enough, now we can link salespeople every single minute of the day, so they can "leverage" the "collective intelligence" to make yet another sale ... even though this "collective intelligence member" might be having dinner with her kids ! This probably rings a bell, right ? What I say for sales departments stands true for any other dimension of the corporation, if social technologies are used within existing processes, mindsets, organizations.

It is my belief, that we need to push for corporate transformation. And therefore, yes, as I said in my introduction "the social or web2.0 technologies now deploying across the economy bring with them a mindset that allows fresh economic and business thinking and therefore the achievement of that new prosperity. There is an opportunity for this new leadership to reach its goals. " There is an opportunity for growth ! But, and it is a huge but, it will need thinking twice about growth and the value growth creates, probably going in the direction pointed by Michael Porter or Umair Haque. And once some ideas about value evolve, there is a need to think about how to share the value that is created, probably using existing models such as Wikipedia, the open web, or so many others. Then, we just might need to reinvent strategy, so that the environment, society, people at large, are not considered as externalities. That thinking made strategy much too easy. It's time to grow up.

About W2e : the technology to change the world ?

2011-10-14T15:35:00.000+01:00

The Web2.0Expo is a wrap. And as I start to look back on the speakers, start-ups and attendees I met, it strikes me that, for all the great announcements, innovations and ideas, technology is taking back-stage.

Do not get me wrong: technology was impressive all along, but the real focus was on using it to change the world.

Changing corporations

The IBM survey of CMOs and Melissa Parrish from Forrester pointed out that corporations are not ready for these new social technologies. CMOs (and leaders at large, it would seem) are yet to develop their awareness of the changes that have taken place and understand what the new technological (and social) environment, and mainly social technologies and data imply for their corporation. And let me be specific : what it implies for their organization, for their value chains and for their strategies.

That view, though, is only the higher, hierarchy-focused view. Because in listening to the speakers and practicioners, you get the notion that social technology is mainstream now as are the practices to adopt it and make the most of it. It was interesting to hear Peter Kim present what he calls social media mythbusters :

Consumers in control ? No ! Consumers are not in control, you, as a company, set the stage for their experience of your company’s services, and you should take responsibility for it. This idea of responsibility kept coming back during the conference. I loved the way in which Siobhann Quinn closed her speach about the five Laws of Engagement: "with those laws come responsibility, do not cheat on us, try to make us better people, better consumers, better contributors".
Social Media as obvious ? No ! Social media is not straightforward, you do need a strategy and even an advanced social media architecture as Joshua Ross defended. Seen from my prospective as a practitioner, indeed there is such a thing as a social media architecture, and I would argue that each corporation needs to design its own , adapted social media architecture. Indeed, your social media architecture won’t reach its potential if you haven't developed you own internal Collaborative Way. And you should know that, in developing your collaborative way and then building your social media architecture, the focus should not be on conceiving a great system but on engaging your managers and your employees to iteratively build it with you. Or, in the way Phin Barnes elegantly puts it, you need to design your organization for design

Face your responsibility, develop your collaborative way and your social media architecture ... but also, of course, learn and keep learning about each platform inner workings. There were great presentations about Facebook from Michael Lazerow and Ruben Quinones, and about Google+ from Adria Richards. It was even more interesting to listen about other platforms such as YouTube or Blip.tv from Dina Kaplan and their potential impact on internal communications.

Last of these speakers about the impact of social technologies and evolving mindsets on the corporations, Christina Gagner gave an overview of where the regulation is going. Self-regulation was the key word, as regulators are still playing catch-up and not necessarely from the most adapted viewpoint. Europe, a regulatory leader, would have some lessons for America.

Summary about the corporations then: the technology, the strategy, the managerial practices that are needed by our corporations have already been developed. The race is on to adopt them, and, believe me, no one will talk about a mere nice to have new social media.

Changing the Economy & Society

Social technology is also making its way towards changing society. One of the showcased start-ups, Fresh.oc.ra.cy, aims at helping Newyorkers learn to eat again ! So it’s technology, yes, but used to diminish waste, to save time, and to learn old and forgotten key social and family traditions like the family dinner.

Great presentation also from Nora Abousteit about how technology can change fashion and community, but also, most interestingly, about how all the achievements in technology should bring us reconsider the educational power of making.

Shelley Bernstein talked about how technology helped her engage the Brooklyn Museum visitors, and, as a result, collectively transform their experience of the Museum.

It was Carlota Perez that helped us make sense of these social ventures. We are in the fifth industrial revolution (after the first one, the second with the steam engine, the third with heavy industry and the fourth with mass production) and we are entering the deployment phase of this information revolution. Today, "what's good for IT is good for the world, and what's good for the world is good for IT". A very interesting perspective on why leaders are lost as they look on the existing conditions with their common sense (read what Duncan Watts has to say about the myth of common sense) and a call to action for all those that, as the examples above show, having understood technology are out and using it to change the world.

Changing democracy ?

But my ah-ha moment came during the Start-up showcase, when the founders of ElectNext introduced me to their beta version. ElectNext later became one of the two choices of the Expo for most interesting start-ups. How these choices were made says a lot about the organizers own sense of responsibility. It was not about winners and loosers, it was about starting the most meaningful conversations. And their two choices were start-ups that are transformational to society and to democracy.

But let me come back to ElectNext: using basic social technology and business model (online dating) to improve the voting experience. When I think about it, is it not a great way to educate voters, that usually have no time to delve into how the candidates voted (and not only what they have to say) and most often rely on their common sense when participating to political choices ?

I have been arguing these past few years that social technologies were an opportunity for corporations to reinvent their social value, their role in society. Would you not say that mastering these three dimensions are key milestones on a roadmap to renewed leadership ?

What leadership programs will not achieve - thoughts about Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T11:45:00.000+01:00

I was trying to put together a few ideas about the future of training and leadership in this connected world, when I learned about the death of Steve Jobs. So I thought I would pay a tribute to someone that co-created and built a company I started understanding and admire only ten years ago.

Even though I started working with a Mac, I was really converted to using Apple products by Claude, one of my good friends and partners. Convincing me would take time as I was all about building Talent Club into a software company at that time, and managing costs (I thought) was key. So Claude did convince me on the "cost" side - yes, Apple products are really cheaper than you would know, but you need to understand some things like value in a different way. Following, he started a slow (maybe painful for him) process of giving me some insights into Apple ways. And his main lesson, that I have made mine in my consulting activity today was : "Well, if that's what you need, why don't you just do it ?". Apple products are built so that you can easily do everything that they promise - no more, no less.

There are two other things I remember about learning the Apple ways. First, the importance of being true to its own principles. If I understand correctly, most of the success of Apple today rests on it having built a community of developpers on this very foundation (software development principles in this case, but you could argue the same about design principles and industrial principles).

Second, the ability that Apple has (or Steve Jobs had) of inventing the product you could not even dream about but, deep inside, unconsciously, you were ready for. It is how I translate my experience each time I discover a new product or a new evolution : I would certainly not have thought about it, but I was actually waiting for it to push my own professional practice further. I have really had these experiences each time I change my Mac or upgrade OSX.

All will be said about Steve Jobs these days, by people who knew him, so I had better stop here. I would just add that the the impact of people like Steve Jobs would not be predicted nor made possible by any educational, leadership or management program. And that is a very humbling thought for someone who has tried understanding how improving individual and collective ways of working can help advance our corporations

I've had the intuition for a long way that leadership practices we so carefully develop are only a way for corporations to face the shortage of truly exceptional people.

At the high end of the ladder, it's all about believing in yourself (“You know, I’ve got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can’t say any more than that it’s the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me.”) and showing strong character (“My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”) - quotes from Macstories

Against Facebook SOS - the danger with analogies

2011-09-28T10:02:00.001+01:00

The number of conversations around social operating systems has been increasing lately. Ben Elowitz even argues that Facebook has "boldly annexed the web" and become the central social operating (SOS) system of the social web (here).

I have written myself about social and corporate operating systems (here and here), and I am quite worried about what I see appearing. There are three reasons why I am worried:

To begin with, analogies are useful as explanation tools, but they carry with them an empoverishment of meaning. That implies responsibility from anyone using an analogy;
Secondly, considering Facebook (or any other social platform, for that matter) as a SOS demands that you ask some tough questions about resources, applications, hardware, users and, most importantly, ownership and meaning;
And finally, there is the corporate wave of social technology adoption. One of its impacts is the generalisation of "generally accepted social usages" (GASU) within corporate firewalls. A corporation may master these GASU without any need for deep reinvention. The corporate OS is just an OS, such as the SOS is just an SOS. It will certainly give corporations unheard of power. The question about meaning and intent again needs to be asked.

What can you do when given acces to a powerful OS ? So many wonderful things and the more powerful the OS, the more astounding your achievements. But there are no intrinsic ethics in achievement. And therefore the key issue is responsibility, both corporate and personal. In this post, I will concentrate on the social sphere and will write about corporate OS in a future post.

What does it mean for Facebook or any other to be a social OS ?

What does the OS provide its users with ?

Easy access to ressources - in this case, ressources are Facebook algorythms and our own personal data - welcome Timeline !
The possibility to build applications that accelerate the leverage of these ressources,
The potential to achieve the user's goals (personal or profesional) faster and deeper.

Now, who are the users ? Obviously, ourselves, anyone who has a Facebook account and plans to use it to make Facebook friends, share information with friends and family, keep track of relatives whereabouts, and engage in new social interactions. Keep in mind the potential of the system to develop new social interactions as an effect of developers creativity ...

There are other users : organizations, and today these are mainly marketing, media and PR companies as well as the members of Facebook business ecosystem.

Who is the owner of this system ? Facebook. What is Facebook ? A joint-stock, limited liability corporation. What is its goal ? To make a profit from serving its clients. Who are its clients ? Well, Facebook clients are the second category of users : Marketers. PR firms. New media ventures. Application developers.

These firms will pay Facebook for the right to use our data to better serve us. Us, the final beneficiaries of the whole system. This is just a business relationship, governed by the principles that have brought us where we are in terms of wealth, but also in terms of risks. And, given the sheer size of Facebook, and the amazing and growing speed with which the whole business ecosystem operates, it is key to loudly ask the tough question : where is the regulation that ensures that no entrepreneur turns to the dark side ? That no firm uses data patterns and intrusive technology to steer our consumption habits, play with ingrained fears or wants, in short, make a profit out of an unbalanced relationship ?

We are entering a whole new social dimension, and we come from a time when corporations (or the capitalist system, you might say) has been able to transform almost all human activities into economic activities. Lack of farsighted regulation has got us into financial trouble these days. I would argue this is nothing compared with the potential for trouble now building in front of us.

Facebook is a social utility, or at least it goes by that denomination. There are other utilities : transportation companies, water companies, ... They manage some of our key natural or urban ressources. Facebook manages part of what will become one of our key ressources in the future, the data and the knowledge that results from our interactions.

I do not question Facebook ethics nor its right to pursue its own corporate objectives. But i think it trades in a ressource which will prove key in building the future of our relationships, of the products and services we develop and consume, of the collective knowledge and intelligence we produce.

Its potential for profit being what it is, this is too important a business field to be left to the "invisible hand" to govern.

Why firms should stop adopting social technologies

2011-08-24T11:32:00.000+01:00

I was reading a piece of counterintuitive writing on the Forrester blog, when it struck me : corporations should really stop adopting social technologies or even embarking on a path towards E2.0. Wait, isn't this my job after all, helping my clients move in that direction ? In fact, it really isn't.

When I try to understand what's behind the groundswell of social technologies, three facts come to mind : deep IT & business education of entrepreneurs; availability of funding (and advice); existing web (or internet) ecosystem. Same three facts, by the way, that could help in describing Google culture (I know google culture is much more complex than just three facts ...).

I think that to reach the level of value creation existing in the social web (which is possible) corporations need to disrupt themselves. Why ? Because bringing deep IT and business education to all, making funding available for projects depending on executives flair (and not tired CAPEX measures) and opening up their intranet spaces to all, is disruptive. Because long IT projects (taking six months to choose a CSN !), existing ROI mindsets and static performance measures will not let a corporation really change.

As a leader, you should not adopt social technologies to change your corporation but think instead about why social technologies flourished in the web, in the first place. These technologies are helping unlock human potential in a way that has never been seen before. THAT is a real, worth fighting for goal for your corporation, and not, obviously, just making the number of conversations grow.

Going Foursquare! Gamification of talent management

2011-07-20T09:20:00.000+01:00

This is a post I first intended as a Hack for the Management Innovation eXchange

Origins of Talent Management ... stil valid ?

Talent Management Systems have been developed in classic, hierarchical organizations. They are most often based on heavy frameworks (competency framework, performance framework, key positions framework, ...) that have proved their value in slow-changing organizations (themselves buried in slow-changing environments).

These systems are great options to develop leaders and managers supposed to fill the shoes of their elders, and continue with the same type of leadership and management models. Such systems have been extremely efficient in industrial-age corporations such as General Electric, Danaher, Valeo, ...

These systems have two important shortcomings : they are selective and static. Simply put, they lead to choose between two leaders or managers and they certainly do not foster innovation (innovative skills, behaviours, gems - see this hack).

In an ever accelerating organizational evolution and a deeply socialized world (through social technologies), these systems represent a major hindrance for organization evolution. They often result in HR teams having to work "around the system". They also result in dissenters and alternative talents leaving the organization.

From practices to a "Talent Locator & Accelerator"

The talent locator and accelerator is built following three phases : analysis of existing social networks that have a proximity with the corporation; defintion of a dynamic system (the talent locator and accelerator); new system adoption driving

HR teams should analyze the recognition & engagement systems in social networks, that are specific to each social network focus (professional, conversational, friending, ...). Such systems have been able, at the same time, to engage an ever increasing number of members while being able to make each individual stand out in regard of her/his particular abilities, friends, opinions, postings, ...

This analysis will help HR teams define new recognition systems in terms of :

What needs to be recognized (basis for engagement) : is it participation, contribution, belonging, raw talent, innovative talent, particular abilities, exceptional performance, ... ?
How to identify / measure the items that need to be recognized ? If, say, participation or contribution can be measured in terms of quantity and quality, measuring an innovative skill is almost impossible. In this particular case (and similar ones), HR teams will need to innovate themselves and devise new means for identifying particular abilities or innovative talent. For instance, a marketing expert that gets an unusual high number of "likes" (or its corporate equivalent) has probably a new idea or a particular ability. HR teams should be able to poll the "fans or followers" (or their corporate equivalent) of the marketing expert and identify the new talent or ability;
Who will be responsible for recognition : leaders & managers ? peers ? the whole organization through a specific social intellegence tool ? a given community members ? Working on measurement and responsibility for recognition is probably a huge opportunity for impact of HR on strategy development
When (if ever) is formal evaluation needed ?
What type of reward will be tied to a particular type of recognition : financial ? reputation ? influence ? professional development ? social engagement ?
How will recognition translate into the existing corporate social network ? Badges, recomendations, other symbols ?

Adoption of such a system should start where new social technologies and usage is high, but also in parts of the organization that are in dire need of innovation. Adoption of such a system is not a simple, unidirectional project. It is a continuous feed-back loop, in which new dimensions are added to the recognition system as new business, functions, geographies adopt the system.

In the end, recognition of talent, abilities, performance, participation, must become a solid part of the corporate culture and of individual activity

Beyond Talent Management - musings from SuccessConnect

2011-05-23T08:06:00.000+01:00

I was in Amsterdam these past two days, invited by Pierre to witness the presentation of SuccessFactors. It was a pleasure to discuss with Pierre and French team, with Patchen and CubeTree team, and get some insights into the company's new developments and vision. I was impressed by the execution power the suite gives you and by the vision that was presented to me. But more than that, I could indulge into some day-dreaming about what comes next for talent-centered, innovative corporations ...

Executing from your Talent environment

First thing that caught my attention, you could start working, collaborating, executing, right from your "talent page". If I understand correctly, Cubettre and Jambok give the suite the possibility, first to connect and collaborate and then to accelerate content sharing and social learning. Of course, that's what many social collaboration software suites do ... But the starting point, here, is your own "talent" page (home page) the one that is linked to talent management processes. That makes a huge difference

Another key point to me was the very "toy-like experience" of the suite, and namely in its mobile version.

I have been working in E2.0 projects these past few years, and quick adoption is key to reach the benefits of extended professional collaboration (innovation, labor productivity, process efficiency). As Patchen had it, if your collaboration environment is linked to your talent management suite, if the user experience is close to best practice (Apple, Facebook), you can achieve 100% adoption. Point taken. I have not seen 100% adoption so far, and sometimes threats to adoption come from HR teams focus on control. This might be an answer.

HCM suites have the potential to make talent management a strategic capability, way beyond it being a simple addition of professional practices. Adding social collaboration to this capability is a great move.

I wrote some years ago how we were moving to people-centered corporations. I also wrote that collaboration would bring talent management from execution to strategy ... That is the vision I understand Successfactors has

Strategy from the HR field ?

If I try to look into what adoption of similar HCM & social suites could bring, I would underline:

First, a great agility for Talent Management processes. Social collaboration has the potential to "break the process sequence" if necessary. That helps accelerating execution and saving "muda", as they say in lean manufacturing ...
In second place, if social collaboration is widely deployed, it will greatly help Talent Management culture deployment. This is when Talent Management can become a capability (when it is shared by at least every manager from top to front-line);
Then, HR professionnalisation is made easier from tools like Jambok or just from "folloving" the activities and social production of selected peers; of course, professionnalisation is not limited to the HR team;
Tying collaboration to people management will help its deployment, as said earlier. The key point here is that the collaboration culture can be driven from the HR perspective (behaviours, usage, values, ethics). This is a key point. Collaboration through social technologies has a great potential for improvement, and that is why it should be driven from the beginning by strong governance (and not control). You could choose tool governance, what some corporations are doing. The danger here is to end doing just that, governing tool deployment and forgetting about professional behaviours and values evolution;
Finally, when you link collaboration to HR, it should be easier to identify professional behaviours that foster innovation. And that is key in the 21st century economics.

Beyond talent management

Let's dream for a moment. Imagine that corporations adopt integrated and distributed HCM suites, and that they are conveniently linked to a state-of-the-art collaboration environment (social technologies, mobility). What could we imagine for a such corporation ?

In the first place, and regarding talent management, you could go beyond "breaking the processes sequence". In fact, there is room to reinvent talent management practices and fundamentals by learning from new collaboration practices and behaviours. And reinventing talent management practices is key if you want your corporation to transform itself into an innovation-based corporations;
And that is just the beginning. Because, to take full advantage of the mass collaboration opportunity, management practices too, have to be reinvented (see what social value means). In my view, corporations need to move from managing execution to managing innovation, and that is a huge step;

I wrote some months ago, that you need depth to thrive in the new, accelerated, connected, real-time business environment. Making collaboration a key capability, and not only enabling it through tool development will make all the difference.

Maybe it's time for HR to take the lead

In 2011, do not pay taxes (to Google)

2011-01-04T10:36:00.000Z

I was reading a nice piece from TechCrunch, that got me started on what the key movements could be for a better economy in 2011. I have two main ideas :
First, it would be good if we stopped paying Google any more taxes. After all, the WWW is ready to die (or be born again), and there are "civilized" places that are already replacing it : FB and all other social networks, to start with.
It is as if we were going out of the Gold Rush era, when gold seekers would enrich peak and shovel vendors while going bust at the same time, and new, organized business (as Sears or the railway monopolies) would patiently build their trade.
Yes we need a new Google, because it's high time we got paying for value, not for Google sponsored links. And we really need Google, because I do not like the perspective of an internet totally dominated by social networks. Innovation happens at the fringes after all ...
Second idea, we need a vision. All this social technology is so powerful that it really needs the ideals that ignited the web at the very beginning to take hold of society. Of course, by society, I also mean business. Umair Haque has written it all in his "New Capitalist Manifesto"
For us E2.0 practicionners, it probably means moving from technology to strategy and then to meaning. Transformation. After more than five years working in this field, I've found out that nothing is more important to the succes of communities, of corporate social networks, of pedia environments and of any social technology initiative than trust and autonomy.
It's all about people, not taxes. I liked the "do not evil" stuff better

God-Emperors of internet ?

2010-08-28T10:55:00.000+01:00

I am a bit worried these days seeing Facebook grow (remember the founder's goals ...)

I was always a big fan of Dune, and while I am no expert about internet strategies, both Google and FB make me think about the plot of the last book in the Dune series, God-Emperor of Dune.

In this book, Leto, an expanded human, has mutated so as to understand (and somehow control) all the possible futures of humanity. The idea is to preserve humanity from extinction, but the means to achieve this is just perfect totalitarism ... built to self-destroy so that humanity will not be tempted again by "safety"...

Similarly, FB and Google self-proclaimed missions (organize and make available ALL human information) can be seen as positive goals. I am aware that, from a capitalist point of view, it is just monopoly in the making, but that is not the point I am trying to make ...

My point is that, if I follow Frank Hervert's plot, to really succeed, Facebook or Google (the one that wins the coming battle) will have to die and dissolve itself into the internet ... after it has given it all its assets.

In fact, and if I take Anderson's point of view about the coming death of the web, Google could be seen as the white knight that fights to preserve the WWW , even tough it has to perfectly dominate it to achieve that (Buzz, Wave, Google Friend Connect, ...). And after that, Google has to accept voluntary death ... that is, dissolve itself into the Commons ... Not the most likely outcome ?

Well, otherwise, and from a least poetic point of view, I hope regulators are muscling up, because the game is going to get tough ...

Death of E2.0 and birth of collaboration environment design

2010-04-02T10:08:00.002+01:00

These past few weeks, I was back to a very intense consulting period, and was almost invisible in the "2.0" sphere (blogosphere and twitterville, basically).

It was an opportunity to think back on these past few months of E2.0 projects, and on the new developments I see appearing. I wonder whether Enterprise 2.0 is not dead ...

I do not mean that projects have stopped or that companies have lost interest in social technologies. I mean that, these past few weeks, I have been working on business issues in which social technologies and improved collaboration were considered as real options to deal with these issues.

There are three business areas in which social technologies and improved collaboration are considered as key improvement axes : innovation management; HR practices improvement; wide corporate transformation.

Social technologies and collaborative strategies are maturing much quicker than I had anticipated, at least in some companies. This should increase the pace of equipment with social platforms and wider collaborative environments. It should also put some pressure on small players, as corporate transformation does not accept partial solutions: building corporate-wide, comprehensive collaboration environments, is no longer a matter of wikis, blogs or microblogging solutions.

In fact, this "death" of E2.0 is an opportunity for CIOs to really think forward and start imagining what their own corporate collaborative environment could look like (see what Dion has to say about this). I forecast that business is going to put real pressure on state-of-the-art collaborative environments. Obviously, off-the-shelf solutions exist.

But they are not enough. Think about it : would you trust your building company to design your next industrial plant, or would you have your preferred architect meet with your manufacturing, R&D, management and supply-chain guys to design the plant best adapted to your industry challenges ?

This is exactly the challenge with collaborative environments. Use off-the-shelf solutions, and you will get average environments. Now think about what that will mean for your human capital, knowledge management, innovation management and client relationship strategies ... Exactly. Collaboration environment design just became your key strategic move.

Integrating social platforms with legacy systems - Microsoft, Dassault Systèmes or Google ?

2010-02-09T21:52:00.002Z

I was lucky enough to be invited with one of my clients to Paris MS Campus to have a conversation about Microsoft social platform (Infopedia, AcademyMobile, Mingle, ...). It was the second time I had the opportunity to see a social platform. The first time was when I visited Dassault Systèmes. And when I think about the two approaches, I think we are in front of two major trends. The third one, obviously, is Google's.

I have written elsewhere that we will be quickly finishing the contribution era and entering the time of the builders, a time when employees (builders) will keep adding value through applications and not just through content (no matter how useful or brilliant). Appart from skills and behaviours (and that will take time), builders need an Enterprise Computing Platform (for want of a better name) and such a platform, to my mind, includes legacy systems, vertical systems and social systems.

The way I understand it, Microsoft proposes to integrate your existing systems into its social platform, to build an upgraded computing and social environment. The case of HR is interesting. HR systems (and mainly the job classification systems) is included in the social platform (namely, it appears in an employee social profile). How the social sphere impacts employees' development and appraisal remains every manager's choice.

What I see happening here is that the social platform becomes an upper layer, below which existing processes keep working as they used to. As someone at MS told me, the really useful knowledge, more often than not, is in your legacy systems. So MS will manage to have those legacy systems talk with the social platform, and it will actually try to feed some social data and content into those systems.

It is yet another layer that gets built.

I was impressed by Dassault Systèmes as much as I was by Microsoft, and yet their approach is fundamentally different. Dassault Social Platform, so far, is closer to an intranet to my mind; it is their vision that I find really amazing : Dassault proposes to rebuild your business through their modelling approach. Instead of just trying to link a social platform with existing legacy systems, I understand Dassault will propose to review your whole operation: starting from the service you plan to deliver to your customer, actually starting by modeling the entire customer experience and then modeling the processes, and the support systems around it.

It is basically a Toyota-like approach: dont build plants and then adapt them to several car models. Instead, design a model and build a plant around.

Those are two fundamentally different views of corporations, one that sees corporation as rather static beings and the other that sees them as continuously evolving organizations. The interesting point is that both approaches see value in fostering innovation through improved collaboration (which is what the social platform is all about, I think).

The third approach is represented by Google. When the GoogleStore opens up, you will have all resources you need to build an entire Enterprise Computing System, including ERP and social platform, and probably also the technology needed to develop your own internal applications.

So what will we have ? My take is:

Microsoft approach for incumbant corporations in slow growth markets, where price is an issue, and where reinventing the trade seems too difficult;
Dassault Systèmes approach for mid-sized to large corporations in growth markets, with complex industrial / knowledge processes, and where reinventing oneself is not an option but a survival strategy.
Google approach for extremely quick firms, probably operating in the social field, where there is little value in organization, and much more value in "network first, profit later". Useful probably for firms that do not plan to survive after their goal has been reached (a new species I see appearing quite soon).

What will be your choice ? Business, after all, starts with making bold choices ...

Why how your company thinks is important - the need for governance change

2010-01-26T20:17:00.000Z

Some thoughts on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

I have been all but floaded with posts and tweets on the above subject in the past few hours. It is an interesting issue, hotly debated in the United States, and it covers two issues, that I have first discussed in Robert Paterson's blog:
- How you treat corporations from a legal standpoint : treating corporations as legal persons (see corporate personhood) would almost naturally bring you to the decision taken by the Supreme Court;
- How corporations think and act internally, given the (overlooked) fact that they are legal persons that employ scores of natural persons, and yet, are not democracies.

I discussed in my latest post why it was important to change the way a corporation thinks, using the OS analogy. The basic idea was that the increasing complexity of the economic, social and technological environment stretches the limits of the corporation's old industrial OS (taylorism, hierarchy, monolitic culture), and that social technologies provide an opportunity to reengineer this OS.

If I push this idea a bit further (which is anyway where I want to go), what we also see is that, by working on ideas more than on products (intangible assets more than on tangible assets), corporations are slowly but firmly changing the human dimension they target. Let me be clear : industrial corporations helped increase the general well-being by developping utilities, infrastructures, basic products and services and (even though this is also often overlooked) by making hunger (in industrial countries) a sad exception. Corporations in the now-ending knowledge economy increased the part of intangibles in their operations.

I think this is fundamentally changing. Today, as most markets are mature and saturated (who would want to market cars, today ?), companies will compete for a share of attention, which is also a share of mind, of talent, of influence of each one of us. The human dimension that some of these new type corporations target is not physical well-being nor general consumption but values, beliefs, meaning. It's having all information flowing freely in the world within a "do no evil" philosophy; it's providing the people a technology so that they can invent new usages (see what Umair Haque has to say about ideals beating strategy in the 21st century).

So we have some corporations working on the very fabrics of society. And, oh, by the way, banks have taken on the business of creating money (and then using it to pay themselves bonus, that they can use in the real economy).

Another point. I will not speak here of SMEs, entrepreneurs or your average Mom & Pop business. Some corporations, though, are huge. Really impressive. I think McKinsey published something on mega-corporations being a key trend for this century. I do believe that is true. Some corporations are really too big to fail (from a social point of view).

It is because such corporations have been given the legal person status that we have an issue to think about. Such corporations, today, try to have an influence on the landscape they compete in (business is business) and, with this Supreme Court decision, they have no real limit on what they can do.

Here, what we basically have then, are social structures (huge corporations ARE social structures) with influence in government affairs that are NOT democracies. Given the power that corporations will be gaining in the coming decades, when they work on ideals and attention, this will be entirely different from having industrial conglomerates that can lobby for the price of raw materials ... These corporations already behave as small societies, and some have for years already replaced the state or society for basic public services such as health, insurance, ...

I might be pushing this, but how different is this from having one of the 50 states not being a democracy ?

So, my opinion on all this ? Having corporations being able to influence political life is a real issue and I quite agree with people thinking about constructive capitalism, or with people trying to bring new, more collaborative ways and structures into the corporation. It's what I do. I also think the court decision did not really delve into what a corporation really is.

And that is what we need to think about now. I feel it is high time corporations governance included some references to democracy in the way key orientations are taken. Once they reach a certain size, I certainly do not see why they should be governed by shareholders. And that seems a really tough political question to tackle

Has the web changed the way your corporation thinks ?

2010-01-24T07:56:00.000Z

The year 2010 has but started and the web seems brand new to me these days as I read blog after blog : is it becoming a predictive, squared, intention web ? And as the persons polled by Edge underline, will it change the way each of us thinks, individually ? Will it make this thinking shallower (or deeper) ? Will it push people from thinking to searching ? Will it allow rediscovering ways long ago forgotten ?

All of this and probably much more the web has accomplished or will accomplish shortly. Deeper, though, what the web is empowering is a new, key infrastructure in our society, a human infrastructure that changes the reach of our individual and collective thinking - and acting. This is, I believe, just a fact: the millions of people connected through social networks, the communities emerging, pursuing a purpose and dying in the social web, they have become a new human infrastructure. Look at what Brian Solis has to say about contextual networks.

How our individual thinking evolves is a question that will be debated for a long time, as it touches fundamental questions about what we are and what we are becoming. People like Ollivier Dyens or Ray Kurzweil have thought deeply about it.

To me, a more pressing and actionable question is, has the web changed the way your company thinks ? We all know that the web, along with this emerging human infastructure, is an environment for which the traditional, industrial company, is not ready. Young start-ups, the Googles and Facebooks of this world, were born in this environment. Not so for older companies, that still make the wast majority of an economy's players.

So, have you thought lately about your company's brain ?

From corporate OS ...

Because companies think, right ?

If we take some time to look back, companies, "enterprises" were at the beginning just that, enterprises born of the individual initiative, that is so cherised by neoliberal economists. Did they actually think ? It is likely that the question did not have a meaning for a long time. Companies accomplished things, almost naturally (build, sell, ...). People in these companies had their thoughts, for sure, but if any thought was to be said to be a "company thought" that was the thought of the boss, the owner, the leader.

With industrialization, corporations began to think. Their thinking was like that of our first computers : limited and slow. But then, so was the economy. This thinking was based on what can be thought of as the first «corporate OS» : taylorism, hierarchy, corporate culture. If you think about it, one of the objectives of taylorism was to avoid shop-floor employees making decisions, in fact doing anything that had not been predicted by the management system, whether it was mechanical work, problem solving or even learning. Some people have defended that the very objective of all this was to be able to make predictions on profit (see André Gorz), and you cannot make (economic) predictions without accounting. It would not be that difficult to jump to the conclusion that accounting was the basic, unevolved thinking of the industrial corporation. We should also add some ideas about marketing and demand, and, more recently, TRS. Not quite poetry.

Complexity, in markets and in the economy at large, fostered a response from the corporation. As complexity grew, corporations began doing things that were not in their original genetic code. They began their mutation. Their environnement was hitting them hard with an accelerated stream of demands, social, economic, as the infrastructured that linked them to other companies, to the society, to the economy, began to grow and become more efficient.

We started thinking about the knowledge worker when the key issue was probably the knowledge corporation, this really being of a different kind than the industrial corporation. I think off the knowledge corporation as an evolved industrial corporation, still using the same OS, but adapted, stretched to its limits, to be able to manage relations in an evolved environment. Windows XP or Vista, if you want an analogy.

Just push that analogy a bit further and you will understand why, today, it is time to change that first corporate OS and help our corporations grow the brain they need to enter the conversation.

... to "deep brain"

Let me come back to that idea of corporate OS (I talked about it first in the French blog of Talent Club). We could look at the industrial corporation as a system with:

Ressources - raw materials, capital, people, ...
Users - basically, management, employees, clients
Applications - the practices and machines that allow users to make the system work
An OS - the principles that allow coordinating the activities of the different applications and allocating resources to them. In the industrial corporation, this OS included the org chart, hierarchy and some basic principles of corporate culture (management practices, ways of working).

What do we see happening (or should we see happening) in our corporations ?

Organization charts are being challenged (or complemented) by corporate social networks. A corporate social graph is surely better suited to identify and involve ressources in companies that compete in a market gone realtime;
Hierarchy as the only organizing principle is being challenged (Jon Husband explains this better than me) and new ways are being developed. I, for one, work most of my time at helping my clients develop their own collaborative ways;
Finally, the old, windows-based ways of working are being replaced with the new, more open, dynamic and collaborative ways of working that come from adopting and adapting web 2.0 tools.

Yet, this is all so more complex than just adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools... As a new human infrastructure has developed thanks to the web, so can it develop within the corporations that adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools. A new human infrastructure ...

It's not about intranet 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Networks, stupid ! It's not about challenging hierarchy ! It's about building the system (brain, organization, call it what you wish) that allows the corporation to adapt to the new competitive environnement by making its internal human infrastructure better than the existing, web based, human infrastructure. It's about reaching your corporate objectives (oh, you will need to revisit those, by the way) - satisfying your clients (oh, you also need to think again about client satisfaction) - rewarding your stakeholders (oh, you really need to know better who your stakeholders are).

Building your company’s deep brain and getting ready for the enhanced web in 2010

I wrote before that a deep brain was what a company needed to exist in this new, realtime web environment. And by exist, I mean business and meaning. It is the new, people-centered, corporate working environment that leverages both the strengths of the organization and of the social networks and technologies. I also wrote that the main difference between a company's brain and the internet-based, free, human infrastructure (quick brain) lied in how and why people made connections and what those connections were intended for.

My work in 2009 has allowed me to push those ideas just a bit further. If you want to build a deep brain (or, plainly speaking, if you plan to adopt social technologies in the interest of your company - and I mean interest in the context of constructive capitalism), here are a number of ideas you might look into.

First, technology. You do not buy technology anymore, you develop several platform strategies. Internalize key skills and leadership. Build a prototyping mode. Look first into your employees and clients future challenges. If your idea is just to have "collaboration technologies", stick to old MS Office;
Some examples here : do not buy a search engine, why not try developing the algorythm that fits you ?
Do not buy a social network, why not think about your own people-centered HR strategy ? And if that is not enough, involve the marketing and PR guys and make them think about client / partner collaboration;
You are all about idea generation software, folksonomy and social bookmarking ? First, why not try some evolution of your internal ways of working ?
And finally, management ... big question, what happens with management ? In my experience, nothing much, unless you give them a mission : make "social collaboration" (or whatever you want to call it) happen. I am lucky enough to have a client that has done just that. Obviously, you have understood also, that how he set people out on the mission was critical.

Leadership. It's all about governance. By governance, I mean that you need to go beyond what the board asks you to do. Beyond. Higher. It's about loosing micromanagement frenzies, quaterly objective pressures, alignment ideas, management engagement and all that stuff. Reinventing your job (earn that bonus, what the hell!) to reinvent your company.

Changing the way I think

2010-01-13T16:16:00.000Z

I was not among the people that were asked "How is the Internet changing the way YOU think?" by Edge. I just found out about this initiative as I was getting ready for a lecture on New Ways of Working.

Reading through the answers and reflecting on the question, I have to say that the internet has indeed changed the way I think.

First, I now relate differently to my sources. I rely less on names and official sources, on known bloggers or writters, and allow myself to search without precise direction for some time, relying on luck - in fact, believing in serindipity. Where I was used to reading I know have conversations with those sources, even though it takes me forever to finish a presentation or a post.

I spend much more time thiniking, in fact, than I used to, and thinking has become a structured activity, with different steps (deciding, looking for ideas, discussing the ideas, going back to the initial thought, formalizing, challenging, engaging in conversations). It's as if thinking today was not the same activity as it was some time ago.

Then, when I think, I now read, look and listen (to Ted, for instance), that is, I use more senses than I was used to.

And, more importantly, I am totally connected, with my reader, twitter, communities, all becoming available resources to help me deepen an issue. I prepare for non-connected periods, where I know I will do two things : some final deep thinking (but it rarely works well) or some easy, low value tasks (that I have to call thinking, because without them, I will not remember my own production).

So yes, definitily, the internet has changed the way I think. What I believe, though, is that my intellectual structure was already there, and probably because of that I am able today to manage these different sources, trends of thoughts, ideas, pieces of information, manage them and add my own little input.

After all, it's probably obvious the internet has changed the way we think. The important question is how the internet will change the way future generations think if it becomes the main element structuring their thoughts (as books ad teachers used to be for us). I am rather optimistic, not sharing what Maryssa Mayer thinks in the Edge piece, much more what Anderson writes. And in the end, being rather happy to participate in this new era that could deliver some collective wisdom.

When realtime is not enough - recap on Leweb09

2009-12-10T21:35:00.002Z

As Billy Flynn says in the musical Chicago, "it's all show business". And I did enjoy listening to keynote speakers deliver their messages, watching some cool new ventures like Stribe or Tigerlily
and having the feeling to belong to one great family. I got a number of insights and the general impression that, whatever Gary Vaynerchuk says about not caring about money, it was all business.

As I gather some thoughts from these two days, I wonder whether realtime is related to content shrinking. It's an idea from Sean Percival: as mobile devices become the first access to the web, content is adapted in size and content consumption time is going down. I would add that status-oriented applications like Twitter or Plancast are also making content shrink. But then, Sean says, some day we will have fat birds instead of tweets, or, as I understand it, dense tweets, that will convey more information. Twitter and other status-oriented services remain basically information/relation transport facilities. Content is indeed shrinking, but mostly in the mobile world.

Considering it from an individual point of view (I do not like the word user), some people like to pass information through, some others like to indulge into some deep thinking. Mobile is fine for passing or obtaining situation-related information. But fixed platforms with huge screes still have a use for deep thinking. Even for passing information. Everyone was connected to his laptop, at LeWeb, probably because there were other things to do than just twitting. Realtime is not enough, not yet.

The second idea I find interesting is Facebook Connect being the social glue of the internet: the service that allows you to bring your social information with you wherever you move. The idea of the glue is interesting, and I find it very similar to what some services do with your credit card numbers, for instance. If Facebook is the social glue, I would say that companies need to make their own glue, and become the insurance glue or the banking glue of the internet. Just as your social data on Facebook follows you everywhere, so should the other, less fancy but probably at least as useful data about your insurance policy, banking accounts, social security status and so on. It's a good approach to your personal identity on the web.

The lasting impression I get, though, is that business is maturing quickly. Applications, for instance, are a grown-up business: 300 have more than a million users on Facebook. But applications are not for developers, they are for well equiped companies, that can deliver them for free and make money out of the business these applications link you to. Applications are like websites, and you do not make money through a website, you make money by delivering a customer experience.

In this maturing business environment, some strategy seems to be needed. I liked the argument between Brian Solis and Matthias Luefkens about ROI. While Matthias argued that you can only try to understand "Return on Involvement", Brian stressed how, today, you need to understand the inverstments your are making in this realtime web.

Jeremy Owyang was the one that really got my attention. This post's title is taken from his presentation (When Real-time Web is not Fast Enough). You need to look at his slides about the web moving from Asynchronous to Realtime (today) to Intention (what I plan to do). And understand about corporations, today, not being able even to keep up with the Asynchronous web. That is why he recomends to personalize social technologies, engage an army of unpaid volunteers and build information systems. A really interesting approach.

I would humbly add a "human factor" slide to each of the three steps in the strategy Owyang proposes:

Personalizing social technologies, and basically socializing your whole customer experience is the way to go. It's important to remember, though, that there are real people behind the social technologies that a corporation can implement. And as I see social personnalization as rather straightforward, I think motivating and training people to the uses and behaviours that are needed in this realtime web is the key issue;
Engaging an army of unpaid volunteers is the second step. In other words, you want your clients to work for you, in exchange of reputation, fun or a particular experience. The best way to get there, obviously, is by having been as lucky as Apple, that has developed a strong customer community throughout the company's life. Other than that, what we are really saying is that we want our employees to work with customers, because advocacy programs will not work for every business. If employees work with our customers to, say, design a compelling experience, they will be building a real community, that could transform into an army of advocates. Advocacy programs may work for large companies, but for smaller ones, I have the feeling it will be employee generated customer communities;
Last and certainly not least, the systems. Nothing to say here, I basically agree that you need to integrate your social media data with the CRM data. There is one system, though, that you need to change before the three steps do work, and that one is management system.

Social web fuels real-time web is one of the last quotes from Jeremiah. I go back to Gary's presentation, when he says it's all about relations, about people. I agree with that, and say that for most companies the challenge lies in changing mindsets. Only, this time, it's not about driving change management programs through the ranks of your company. In the social web, you do not meet company employees, you meet real people.

Realtime is not enough. Corporations need to worry about engaging their real people.

Beyond "enterprise 2.0": age of the builders

2009-12-07T13:24:00.001Z

I finished my former post worrying about the corporation as a bot ... Was I ahead of mysef ? As Google Wave keeps me thinking about changes to come, and this time not in society, but within the corporation, I contend that change will outpace most corporations that do not put collaboration platforms at the center of their strategy. Because, in so doing, corporations might be evolving into something different from what we are used to.

Those that do will be entering the age of the builders, and for them profit must become a second priority.

Changing ways of working : entering the "I have to automate it" era

And what is Google Wave if not the first premium-priced corporate collaboration platform available ?

It’s easy to assume that the impact of collaboration platforms like Google Wave will first be felt in our ways of working, that these platforms will replace email. That will be good, because, in corporations, mail is a poor IM tool, but a huge collaboration platform (think about MS Outlook). Bankers and consultants have been using email like IM for years and this has now become a general trend. In our mails, we add files and links, and sometimes invite people to collaborate with us using versioning applications. But, as everyone knows, that is not what it was intended for in the first place.

This first change then, could be welcomed. We would go from fighting misplaced usage of email to adopting a convenient tool for a company gone realtime. I am not saying this will be adopted easily, but it should not be very difficult.

When a platform like Google Wave is adopted, the difficult thing will be to adapt to bots, to make them more friendly, and then to develop new ones, adapted to real needs. At that point, people are going to start discovering that many of the tasks or activities they do could be better delt with through a bot. If the corporation is clever enough to have a pool of wave developpers at hand, anyone could feel like a software product manager ...

As a matter of fact, we already have bots all around us, we just did not know they were bots until someone (Google) called them by their names. But those old bots were cumbersome and difficult to develop and maintain. In the new corporate platform, bots will be created all over. Because, the objective of the platforms is to give everyone the skills (and the programming power) to build bots. We thought platforms were just for developers ... for them to make cool apps for most social networking sites ... wait until corporations widely understand what's at stake if you want to see real change !

This evolution will probably take some more time. We will be changing our current ways of working and also our understanding of what work is. We will be slowly entering a new era, the «I have to automate it era».

In this «I have to automate it era», we’ll go from solving problems to designing systems that solve problems. And, thinking about it, that is just what every successful entrepreuneur does. Designing a system (business model) to solve a problem or meet a demand. Absolutly. Create the right platform, and you’ll have a perfectly automated corporation. A corporation where entrepreuneurship is the dominant culture.

It seems to me that English (or Chinese) are going to be replaced as the must know language. Tomorrow, we need to learn to talk to the machine. Technology skills will be basic skills for the future blue-collar or white-collar worker.

Workers : from users, to contributors, to builders.

Let’s now deepen into what happens to these blue and white collar workers, as it is them that will suffer the changes in their ways of working.

If we go back in time some years (say, 1970) everybody was a user. People had to learn how to use machines, and then typing machines, and then Wang, and then a word-processor, and then Microsoft Office, and then ... Microsoft Office again, and again once more ... and so on.

That, of course, is still going on.

But slowly, in some enterprises, Enterprise 2.0 is gaining speed. In these workplaces, people are still users, but they need to get ready to continuously master new usages. Not learn them once or twice. Continuously change usages. If they succeed, the next challenge is to become contributors. In a world where reputation is a pillar for influence and where influence is a key professional asset, being a contributor to the collective knowledge of the corporation is key to professional development. Blogs, microblogs, internal wikipedias, folksonomies, we have all kind of systems to contribute through.

Mastering the usages, though, and the systems, is not enough. As the number of contributors grow, corporations are going to find ways to identify and select the best contributions - actually, HR systems have always done that (or tried). They will now look for different contributors, and selection will probably be collective, not individual, but it should keep happening anyway.

Now let’s think forward. Project some years ahead. When these corporate collaboration platforms are widely spread, we are going to become builders. We will be users and contributors but we will need to become builders of the future corporation: identify a problem; find a solution; build a bot. That’s it, builders of the intelligent corporation.

Of the deep mind.

This "I have to automate it" era is going to last for some years ...

And eventually, having entrepreuneurs increasingly quickly solve most issues that arise will push us to the new era. Because, once there are bots all over, we’ll be in the «what do I do next era». Not convinced ? Look at this short video from SalesForce. I love the part when the bot decides whether or not to call a human assistant ... And more seriously, we already are experiencing this: how about this assumption, "people loose their jobs quicker than before because what they have to bring takes less and less time to produce value". Projects are done quicker; corporations are built quicker; success is almost built over night. Have you checked lately how old Google is ? Right.

Training is the answer today to people obsolescence. Not enough. Because not everyone can be trained at the same pace, and training is still an industrial process, based on a mechanical view of the corporation. Adoption of collaboration platforms should also lead towards changing our mindset as organisation and value are concerned.

Organization and value : making profit a second priority.

Let’s consider the user - contributor - builder evolution. Of course, at any given moment in time, there are users, contributors or builders in any corporation. What is interesting is how the majority shifts from one category to the other. And how this impacts how value is created.

Users build value by executing tasks and activities through systems that are conceived in advance. Value produced by users can be easily evaluated, as it is expected by the system. The best example is the assembly line.

Today, most corporations have become automated. Anything that could be conceived in advanced and automated has been automated : and these machines include assembly lines, obviously, but also the ERPs, CRMs, BIs, and most other business softwares. Office work has had its MS Office automation too ...

The issue with this approach is that conceiving in advance is less and less efficient. The economy has gained speed. The systems do not deliver the value they should for very long. Not do the users ...

Contributors build value differently. They are helping the corporation built another key system : if we assume the IT network was built for users, now we needed the knowledge network for contributors. And, of course, not a Knowledge Management network. Who ever said knowledge had to be managed ? Anyway, once they can collaborate and use the existing knowledge network (think of an internal, business focused web 2.0 environment), they can start reacting to fast appearing issues. Something common these days ...

Just an observation. Contributors trust each other. They feel responsible for what they do. And dollar compensation is just one of the rewards they expect. Far from a user perspective, don’t you think ?

Value built by contributors is more difficult to evaluate, as it is not assumed in advance. You can always price a car and from that derive worker compensation. But now, how do you do that when you are selling, say, service, that comes from the collective contribution of a 1000 people firm ? Are you compensating based on position ? Not so easy, when positions are all but dissapearing in the new, knowledge network based corporation.

What about builders ? We have builders all over in our corporations : leaders, researchers, managers, ... But they are still in the minority side of the company. That’s why there is a chasm today (at least in France) between people above and people below a very difficult to define line.

When collaboration platforms are adopted, more and more people will be considered as builders, because building will be expeced of them. By building bots, corporations will be automating knowledge activities and problem solving. Many of the «tasks» that people do in a knowledge-network based corporation might disappear.

Consider what happens when the majority changes. When users become a minority in the corporation, and afterwards, when contributors become a minority ...

Users are left with a difficult choice : become a contributor or go be a user to any other, lesser, corporation; similarly, contributors are left with the choice to become builders or go contribute some-place else. Even builders, once they have put all they had in a bot, will have to learn to build bots for something different or go build solutions to other, lesser corporations.

Productivity gains are here to stay, it seems. It might be that being an entrepreneur will become a real option for more and more people ...

For corporations, value then (at least, financial value), will come from productivity. When everyone is a bot (I mean, when every problem or issue is solved by a bot), more value is produced with less people. How many workers does Facebook have ? Or an investment bank ? There are already companies, I believe, were builders are the majority ...

Or maybe not most value will come from productivity ... maybe, as some companies already do, people development will become the central process of the corporation. Because, in this age of the builders, if every copany concentrates on productivity and does not invest in people development (meaning long term human capital investment), what happens to global demand ? Is it not based on worker compensation, somehow ?

With all the changes we are living through, there is one thing that has not changed : leadership. It is high time it did. In the time of the builders, they will need to become builders themselves. Forget about delivering quarterly earnings to shareholders and begin concentrating on what the corporation is becoming. Think about value, about values, about the social impact of the corporation.

Corporations are not bots. They are machines from hell. Whatever is expected of them, they do. Today, leaders expect quaterly earnings from corporations, at whatever cost. It will be good to challenge this short term vision.

At this point, one thing is clear to me: leaders are needed to define what the corporation needs to become. Otherwise, the disparity in household income that we consider high today, will have just been the beginning of a sad story.

I started this two-post series thinking around Blade Runner. A sure thing: for corporations, waves will not be lost «like tears in rain».

Do Bots Dream of Electronic Corporations ?

2009-11-23T15:00:00.002Z

I was watching Blade Runner when it struck me that, much like androids in that movie were dangerously close to humans, bots in Waves (Google Waves, that is) are, potentially, dangerously close to employees.

Think about it : why all the hype about Google Wave ? After all, it is just another platform, and the fact that platforms are the key component of any corporate strategy is already (widely) understood (this article, for instance). There is great technology in Google Wave, that, I agree with, but we are used to living with increasingly great technology.

No, the more I think about it the more I believe that calling bots its applications and giving them participant status in conversation is the killing idea. Thinking further, while it is a fact that Google people are masters at buzz marketing, there are, I believe, deeper reasons behind the hype:

As a social platform, Google Wave is born at the crossroads of two major social evolutions, that have been dubbed «the end of the guttenberg parenthesis» and «the coming of the singularity»; analyzing bots helps better catch the meaning of these evolutions;
As a business platform, it pushes platform strategy into daylight, and provides the first «mass market» platform for corporate revolution.

I have argued before that the emerging virtual environement (web 2.0, web squared, ...) could be likened to the emergence of a global Quick Brain, in which thinking (or influence), for any given group of people, or for any given company, would rest on becoming a Deep Brain. Google Wave provides me with another opportunity to explore how companies are becoming deep brains, and also to point out the risks that come with using technology without changing our management principles. But I will deal with that in a future post. First, let’s look at our quick brain from a historical perspective.

After Guttenberg ...

Culture production in this new environment, in this Quick Brain, is becoming very different with what it used to be. Thomas Pettitt of the University of Southern Denmark (his document) has intelligently simplified the debates by stating that we are coming out of the Guttenberg Parenthesis, a long period in which culture production became individualistic because of the nature of printing press. In the web 2.0 environment, production is definitely more collective and dynamic : a blog, for instance, is not only interesting in itself, but also as part of the network built by incoming and outgoing links. As the blog evolves, so do the other blogs it is linked to. In this ecosystem, we are continuously adapting our own individual reading and learning processes.

Two or tree years ago, we used to build our paths in the blogosphere, identify our preferred bloggers and thinkers, and usually go back to them for reference. Unlike the ones presented in a book, the ideas that we found there kept evolving, because posts were updated, because its links were changed and mostly because other links had been created. Today, even our preferred thinkers and bloggers are not our only references as the realtime web accelerates connexions between ideas (see what Brian Solis has to say about contextual networks).

I would like to argue that, by providing a platform for collective thought, Google Wave goes one step further, which could prove to be a giant step.

In the first place, a wave is a dynamic conversation. I tell my clients that forum conversations are key learning objects that should be built carefully (from an individual point of view) as they will help others quickly catch up with the thought process of the conversation. To my mind, conversations are key building blocks of communities.

A wave brings another dimension to the conversation. It is at the same time horizontal and vertical. Horizontally, the conversation can linger for ages, as new people or ideas come in. Vertically, every step of the conversation can be deepened. This is something that could be done before in Q&A forums, for instance, but it somehow appears more natural in a wave.

If Twitter, for instance, is a tool for improving the Quick Brain and creating endless contextual networks, then I would say that Google Wave is a tool for building deep brains all around. It has the potential to exponentially increase the thinking power of the web. Other tools and applications had a similar potential maybe (think about social networks), but none of them gave participants to the tool the same power that I think wave participants can have. Through bots.

Yes, secondly, and more important to my mind, a wave brings in bots. The bots in itself are interesting, but not a revolution : after all, we live in a world where more tasks are executed by automated machines (mecanical or virtual) than by humans. As I said before, the point with bots is that they are given participant status in the conversation. Here is where we go back to the androids of Philip K. Dick.

Let’s push further : with basic programming skills, almost anyone can create a bot (an avatar) to add a permanent value to the conversation. That has mind-boggling implications: a person with a brillant idea that can be transformed into a bot could be participating in countless conversations. Well not him, his avatar. Or his bot. Or is actually his bot really his bot ?

Google Wave strikes me because it provides a platform for building deep brains all over, and deep brains in which humans, some day, will not be needed to keep adding value and meaning to the wave (if bot development takes on, then new bots could go back to existing waves and keep adding value to the existing conversation).

And so it is that, in this post-Guttenberg era, we go back to a dynamic, continuously evolving culture. In this cultural environment, books still provide starting points for conversations but, for that matter, so can a blog post or a tweet. And, compared to the pre-Guttenberg era, we have reached a speed level in culture production that was not conceivable before. Why ? Because today, we are not only a human society, we are also a technological society.

... and before "the singularity"

Ollivier Dyens has argued (and brilliantly in my humble opinion) in his book La Nature Inhumaine, that we have reached such a step in our technological development when we need to look at society with new eyes. Biological reality is only a vision of reality. Our key principles (what it is to be alive, human, conscious) are based on that biological reality. It is time to question them.

If you read that book, you will be prompted to change your understanding of what technology is (what is built and transforms matter or perception). For Dyens, we live in a world that is more technological than biological, if you admit that everything we have built, starting with the language, is a technology.

Assuming Dyens position, you may actually wonder whether a book was not already a bot. A participant in any conversation. After all, what it is we are doing when we quote a book (or someone) if not bringing him/her/it in the conversation ?

It seems then, Google did not invent anything. Bots were always here. We used to call them books, or songs, or paintings, or .... Just vehicles for smart ideas. And then, the Guttenberg Parenthesis was not really a parenthesis. Just the time it took us to admit books in the conversation ...

I have to admit it then. Google people are masters at buzz marketing. They just helped me understand the society we have been living in, and that we still look at through our old, romantic, pre-industrial revolution eyes. Just the same eyes many of us still use to look at our professional environment, at our good old organizations.

An, in my opinion, if there is a bot that we should worry about, it is precisely the corporation. I have little doubt that the best ones will take advantage of cheap, easy-to-install and easy-to-program platforms like Google Wave is. Why, if you think about it, why not replace maintenance-intensive FTE with easy-to-develop and maintenance-light bots ?

I’ll be writing about that in a future post.

Dépasser le capital humain ?

2009-06-30T20:43:00.002+01:00

Dernière journée de travail sur le capital humain, organisée par RH&M, qui a regroupé un ensemble de personnes passionnés par le sujet, comme Jean-Marie Descarpentries, Philippe Masson, Wilfrid Raffard, Catherine Kettner ou Sylvie Cresson, entre autres.

Très belle journée, à mon sens, qui m'a permis d'avancer sur le sujet, mais aussi de le remettre en cause.

Avancer sur le sujet, d'abord, parce qu'une journée de travail en commun nous a permis de trouver une approche et une définition du capital humain qui est plus riche que celle que je connaissais jusqu'à maintenant:

Le capital humain :

1 - Est la conjugaison des talents et comportements individuels et collectifs, organisés et développés par l’entreprise pour créer durablement de la valeur

2 - Est aussi une dimension majeure de l’actif et du passif aujourd’hui non entièrement comptabilisée

3 - Il résulte de:

L’épanouissement individuel et collectif
La performance du travail collectif

4 - Il impacte durablement

Les avantages compétitifs
La valeur actionnariale

5 - Son développement demande une remise en cause du rôle du DRH.

Remise en cause de cette approche du capital humain.

D'un point de vue très personnel, ce sont plutôt les réflexions d'un groupe sur "pourquoi mesurer le capital humain" qui m'ont le plus fortement marqué, et notamment la réflexion suivante : en mesurant le capital humain, ne sommes-nous pas en train de répondre à une contrainte externe (lisons: financière ou actionnariale) qui nous demande de ramener la dimension humaine de l'entreprise à des notions connues et qui s'intégrent bien dans la vison comptable de l'entreprise ?

Ce même groupe a souligné l'intérêt qu'il y a, dans cette approche du capital humain, à dépasser le cadre de gestion existant aujourd'hui. Je m'explique : si la mesure du capital humain est importante, ce n'est pas pour ramener la dimension humaine de l'entreprise dans les cadres actuels (organisation industrielle et gestion comptable), mais bien pour contribuer à poser les bases d'autres types d'organisations, et d'autres modes de valorisation de la production de l'entreprise.

C'est pourquoi, à mon avis, partagé par plusieurs des participants, ce débat autour du capital humain, qui ne fait que commencer, pose bien la question du rôle du DRH dans la direction de l'entreprise. Et cette question est posée non pas autour du type d'indicateur qui permettrait de "légitimer l'investissement dans le développement des collaborateurs d'un point de vue financier", mais bien autour de la notion même de la valeur produite pour l'entreprise, qui n'est certainement pas que financière et que la communauté des DRH, en s'emparant du sujet sur le capital humain, pourrait contribuer à remettre sur le devant de la scène.

Un capitalisme plus humain ?

2009-05-15T10:14:00.004+01:00

J'ai eu la chance de participer hier à la première journée organisée par RH&M sur la mesure du capital humain. Mon impression personnelle: la remise en cause d'une certaine approche de l'entreprise par nombre des personnes présentes. Moments choisis:

L'approche de Philippe Masson sur les péchés capitaux du capitalisme, que je cite

L'Utopie de la sécurité au travailleurs contre le profit aux entrepreuneurs,
L'Illusion plus actuelle de l'engagement des collaborateurs comme prix de leur employabilité,
La Gourmandise coupable de quelques dirigeants, tombés dans un jeu d'égos
L'Opacité sur les stratégies et les raisons sinon sur les chiffres
La Frénésie qui mène à des performances sans lendemains

L'impossible mesure du capital humain dans l'entreprise, tant que ne sont pas remises en cause les structures de pouvoir existantes, comme le soulignait Jacques Richard, professeur à Dauphine.

La défense, de la part de Martine Clavel, d'APAX, de la responsabilisation des actionnaires sur la stratégie et la gestion RH, comme élément différenciateur et créateur de valeur.

Enfin, tout au long de la journée, les modèles alternatifs à une organisation classique, ceux qui défendent des principes ou des valeurs différents à la seule valeur aux actionnaires ont été égrainés d''une liste que j'espère voir grandir:

Mutualité,
Franchises,
Partnership,
Ecosystème de PME,
MulitSided Platforms,
Entreprises en réseau,
Capitalisme familial,
...

Il est toujours remarquable que, dans une journée où l'on cherchait à mesurer le capital humain, nous ayons finalement aboutit à une remise en cause, réelle bien que modeste, du système capitaliste actuel.

Séquestrer des dirigeants, ou l'absence de dialogue

2009-04-22T21:13:00.003+01:00

Je ne rentrerai pas dans le débat de la justesse ou la légalité de ces faits qui se multiplient sous nos yeux. Je voudrais souligner le fait, plus grave, qu'ils traduisent : l'impossible dialogue, aujourd'hui, entre une logique financière et une vision plus humaine de l'entreprise.

Les faits, tels que je les comprends : depuis un an, se débloquent sous nos yeux les positions de risques extrêmes prises par des opérateurs sur les marchés financiers. Ces opérations ont porté un coup fatal aux intermédiaires financiers, responsables du financement, de la liquidité et du crédit de l'économie, donc des entreprises. Sauver ces intermédiaires est apparu aux dirigeants des principaux états comme indispensable. Cela a été fait et, au premier trimestre 2009, les grandes banques renouent avec le profit.

L'économie non financière s'adapte plus lentement aux bouleversements vécus par les marchés financiers. Devant l'absence de crédit ou liquidité, l'activité diminue; prévoyant la diminution, les entreprises se préparent, déstockent, suppriment les frais variables qui peuvent être supprimés, notamment les frais de personnel.

Pourquoi cela ? Je vais simplifier, mais je dirai qu'il y a deux grandes raisons:

Pour des TPE et PME, c'est leur survie qui est en jeu; aujourd'hui, alors que les attaques sur les "patrons" se multiplient en France, on entend les histoires de patrons de PME ou TPE qui ne se payent plus depuis le début de la crise;
Pour des grandes entreprises, notamment pour des entreprises cotées, il s'agit de continuer de satisfaire aux critères financiers qui sont devenu la pierre angulaire de leur gouvernance.

Alors, on peut dire que de grandes entreprises cotées qui licencient assimilent leurs salariés à des coûts variables et les licencient pour satisfaire à des critères financiers impersonnels. Je n'ai pas la malchance d'avoir été touché par ces PSE, mais je peux comprendre que l'on isole un dirigeant pour qu'il s'explique; pour qu'il mette un peu d'humain dans la relation entre des indicateurs financiers et des salariés qui en perdant leur job, perdent aussi une partie de leur statut social, de leurs relations, de leur histoire professionnelle, de leur amour-propre et de leur confiance en soi.

Nous ne sommes plus à une époque où les salariés peuvent être assimilés à des coûts variables. Les conséquences sur le tissu social français sont trop graves; les conséquences sur la confiance que les prochaines générations auront dans leurs entreprises et leurs dirigeants sont trop graves; les conséquences de cet état d'esprit sur la société française sont trop graves.

Lorsque la démocratie abdique à la porte de l'entreprise, il ne suffit plus de regarder la loi. A quels extrêmes sommes-nous arrivés pour que des salariés en soient réduits à séquestrer les dirigeants auxquels ils ont un jour fait confiance ?

If collaboration is bad for you, make it better

2009-04-06T12:09:00.001+01:00

An interesting article by Morten T. Hansen underlines the need to carefully analyse whether to launch a collaboration project or not. While he underlines important aspects of successful collaboration, in my opinion, he does not delve long enough in how to build the perfect conditions for successful collaboration within an organization. And what collaboration, exactly ?

I am always pleased to see people taking the time to think about how to make collaboration successful and stressing how difficult this can be. The whole E2.0 movement sometimes seems to forget that collaboration in corporations did not start with the arrival of E2.0 technologies, and that companies have developed skills and capabilities for improved collaboration.

This is, to my mind, why the article by Hansen comes at the right moment. He gives precise examples on why collaboration could fail (overestimating financial results of collaboration, ignoring opportunity costs or underestimating collaboration costs), and therefore contributes to a necessary reassesement of collaboration projects.

Still, I found two aspects of his article that would deserve further research:

First, when analyzing the projected return of the collaboration project, Hansen seems to concentrate on the cash-flow it can generate;
Second, when analyzing collaboration costs, he does not seem to take into account the potential for improved collaboration due to E2.0 technologies.

E2.0 technologies, if conveniently deployed (meaning with strong change management support on new usage and skill development), should greatly diminish collaboration costs. This is something I have seen at most of my clients.

I find even more important to go further into the analysis of the projected return of collaboration, depending on the depth of the collaboration project. Obviously, making two different units or teams collaborate at a given point on a given project generates costs and the returns can only be in terms of cash generated.

But shouldn't Hansen go deeper in analyzing the projected returns of collaboration projects that actually change the DNA of the organization ? Because, in my opinion, when he points that "the collaboration imperative is a hallmark of today's business environment", it is not collaboration as usual.

The hallmark of today's business environment is the development of collaboration as an alternative to hierarchy for a precise number of business situations. We are not speaking about making BUs or teams learn to collaborate transversally (even though this is important). We are speaking about giving the organization a new organization dimension, based of people who are able to identify each other and organize to solve a business problem.

It is about governing and giving responsibility for transversal collaboration that does not need hierarchical micromanagement.

The Deep Brain and the Quick Brain

2009-03-30T20:18:00.001+01:00

Foundations for social network strategy in a connected world

I have spent the past two years leading internal collaboration-based change management programs. Slowly, the conversations are developing, pushing us to the next issue: how to leverage the internal conversations to find a right voice for the corporation in the social web ?

This is not an easy question, and it does not solely revolve around marketing or PR, because, beyond general conversations (that are not always very well considered), what is just begining to happen within the companies I help is new capability development. And I still do not see that happening in the wider social web, at least not to the same level, unless there is a well identified corporation behind (open innovation, for instance).

In the past few days, a post by Brian Solis (the Micro Disruption Theory and the Social Effect) and a tweet by Ross Dawson (using twitter to build the global brain) inspired me to finish organizing my thoughts.

I understand that a global brain is indeed under construction, that I will call the Quick Brain. To participate meaningfully and profitably in this quick brain, corporations must strive to become Deep Brains and then learn to master a new voice. In this world, strategy would revolve around Engaging, Deepening and Twitting (or socializing).

The Quick Brain

The sheer size of online links, searches and conversations has helped rise many voices that wonder whether we are still able to think by ourselves in this environment (see Is Google Making Us Stupid, by Nicholas Carr). My own thought has been that yes, by linking, conversing, searching, we at least loose some of the time we previously had for deep thinking.

And yet, I for one spend a huge amount of time in this new game, and I would say that the share of global attention being devoted to the web is growing fast. The new skills that I am developing (quick reading, tool switching, quick writing, fast thinking process switch, ...) are key to participating in the conversation. But what exactly am I doing, what am I accomplishing in this web ?

The description that Brian Solis makes of Contextual Networks was very helpful in making me understand that role. As I see it, when I participate in a conversation or just forward some information that was interesting or helpful (RT or liking), I am part of an ephemere contextual network, in which I am bound by topic and time to other people. This network is based on existing connexions (friends, contacts, links, followers, depending on the social platform), yet different from those connexions, and it serves a specific purpuse (forwarding a piece of information and increasing resonance).

It is possible therefore to say that the accelerating linking of people in the web is similar to the development of a new kind of infrastructure, let’s call it the human infrastructure. Its objective is to accelerate the transmission of information from one person to another, using existing links and search engines, but also those contextual networks defined by Brian Solis. The web has hypertext links for individual usage. The human infrastructure has contextual networks that it uses to, yes, think (in want of a better word to call this process).

I could then say that, when I tweet, blog, comment, RT or contribute, I am an individual component of this Quick Brain.

Why do I call this brain the Quick Brain ? Because it seems to me that its primary purpose is to accelerate the rythm of information/knowledge sharing, thus provoking insights, inspiration, learnings, ... in the members that are touched by that sharing. And it also seems to me that, in order to think deeply and organize my thoughts, I need to disconnect (or at least, partially disconnect). This brain goes fast, and it inspires or surprises or helps learn. It does more than sharing but does it think ?

To answer that question I would say that deep thinking rests with individuals and organized groups or communities. In that sense, it is clear that companies, much like individuals, are supposed to think. Or at least think deeper than the quick brain.

The Deep Brain.

I make a difference between corporations operating and corporations thinking. Corporations need to be good at operating their business models and also at advancing ideas and concepts, and later use them either to develop services (R&D) or to solve client problems. Increasingly, it’s their ability to continuously advance ideas and solve problems, and transform new ideas and solutions into lean operations, that makes a difference.

The knowledge economy is not a new concept and corporations are used to developing ideas and solutions. What is then different with the arrival in corporations of social computing, E2.0 or, as I like to call it, improved and people-centered collaboration (I have already said that we are entering a time of People-Centered Organizations)?

The main difference is the soft infrastructure that the companies are developing. Yesterday, and contrary to what happens in the Quick Brain, there was a Knowledge Infrastructure in most companies, but not yet a Human Infrastructure. Companies were (most still are) knowledge-centered. With the arrival of social networks and other social computing tools, the corporations have an opportunity to recenter themselves around people or talent.

I would say the Deep Brain is the new, people-centered, corporate working environment that leverages both the strengths of the organization and of the social networks. Like the Quick Brain, the Deep Brain has in speed a fundamental asset, and yet it strongly differs from the Quick Brain:

People (employees) have the ability to create their contextual networks depending on their interest or they can participate in existing contextual networks. Still, many of these contextual networks are long-lived (existing functions or departements), and they maintain strong ties with a number of employees; the attention spams are wider, and people concentrate on a limited number of topics because they have a result to reach;
The number of topics itself is limited, and most of them concentrate around the professional field of the organization;
People (employees) have developed strong common ways of working. Not only do they share a common knowledge, they are also able to work together very efficiently (today, this is what we call a corporate culture);
Most important, to my mind, employees do not engage in conversations or contextual networks only based on their personal interest or attention; they engage in these contextual networks based on their professional responsibility and interest.

When I started thinking about the difference between the Quick Brain and the Deep Brain, I was thinking that there would be a difference in tools: twitter would more useful in the quick brain and blog in the deep brain. Actually, I think now that the important thing is usage, that very often comes after tools. It is how people in a corporation use these tools in consistent ways that will make much of the efficiency of their deep collective thinking.

Engaging, deepening, connecting

How then to leverage your Deep Brain to make a difference in the social web ? That is what I plan to work on for the next months. But I would give a number of insights:

It is more important to engage your people than to train them;
Only based on a special kind of motivation is there a chance for collective deep thinking;
That ability for collective deep thinking will probably be a key skill, and it will be a part of your employees personal reputation, therefore making a strong impact on your corporate reputation.

Your people will be ready to connect, based on skill and reputation.

How do you think this distinction between deep brain and quick brain is helpful for a social network strategy design ?

Social media and governance

2009-02-17T11:54:00.002Z

I have been reading several posts lately that adress the issue of governance of social media governance within corporations. Opinions range from designing guidelines to defining and deploying policies. To my mind, both are right and wrong, as governance is first dependant on a company’s culture and organization.

To be on the practical side, this is what I do when adressing social media and governance:

Linking with the existing governance structure of the corporation, rules, practices, culture and the new social culture (internal and external),
Not setting a document (a charter, for instance) but developing a «charter community» to manage the issue in the longer term,
Work on a beta mode, both on the contents and the form that will be given to the governance charter and charter community
Take time to work on principles (that should not evolve easily),
Take time to work on the «how to» dimension, that should evolve more often.

Progressing towards an increased level of collaboration (that I really prefer to the much publicized Enterprise 2.0) is about managing changes and evolutions. I think developing a real governance initiative is key only when:

The first pilots are over, before it is too much of a constraint and it is enough to define the few principles that will ensure consistency between pilots;
The scope is large enough. Without the proper scope, the need for governance is less obvious at executive level.

Once governance of the social media environment has been designed, once it is operational, it is time to manage relations with key issues: HR driven regulations, communication policies and management practices. How we manage these relations will make all the difference between implementing a social media or transforming the corporation.

My connected life changed with Twitter

2009-01-28T20:26:00.001Z

I am just about to start working on a presentation I will be giving at Netexplorateur next Thursday and as I sit and gather some papers, some thoughts and some coffee, I look at Firefox opening ...

Gmail, Google Calendar, Linkedin, Facebook, Friendfeed open slowly and I also launch Twhirl. I can tell you I am rather tired at this time of the evening and feeling rather slow intellectually.

Then I notice an RT (retweet) from Bertrand Duperrin, speaking about how Michael Arrington was spat on the face earlier today. I read his post, which impacts me strongly.

And I start thinking about how Twitter and my small but growing Twitter world has impacted me since I became an active member about a month ago. I actually, right now, two minutes after my MacBook opened, feel much better, energized by all those guys I see working and reflecting on the same subjects I work on, or just twitting some news about their life, their friends or the latest news from their reader (right now, Andrew McAfee wondering whether executives should know about the cloud, and I'm answering yes, obviously).

The subject I am trying to organize my ideas about is "Management, mobile Technologies, stress and autonomy". Just thinking about Twitter, writing this post, I get at least one insight: To feel autonomous, not only do I need to learn about tools and usages, but more importantly I need to be a member of the correct community through the correct media. And I need to be able to change tools and communities if I change subjects. This is all about increasing intellectual and social mobility for all of us, empowered by mobile and social technologies, and seamless access to the cloud. Managing this is something corporations have not learned to do.

For me, Twitter is the place where I go when I am working or thinking by myself. Yes, not so much by myself, now. I am just beginning to understand it, I think this little tool has changed the way I work.

By the way, for those interested in Twitter, don't miss the great series from FastForward blog.

Web2.0 and profits ?

2009-01-27T21:58:00.001Z

I was just pointed out this article by the Web 2.0 LinkedIn Community. It basically says that social media ventures will make no money, and be bought by other new start-ups which are trying to increase the utility of the web (location based servides and payment systems), that they dub web 3.0

The comparison with the glorious era of railways development has often been made, and yet it is useful to say it again: social media is basically a new kind of infrastructure that shortens distances and time between people (just as the railways did).

In the end, there will only be a handfull of social media companies around and they will regroup most social media vehicles (blogging, microblogging, video, presentations, podcasts, virtual, ...).

We are learning to "travel" in these new infrastructure and maybe some of the frenzy about blogging or microblogging can be compared to what happened to former generations when they discovered railways, cars or the telephone. I am happy to be part of the frenzy and more than thankful to Facebook and its likes.

I do not agree that money will not be made. But even more importantly, a huge value is just being created, a value that might be difficult to evaluate from only a short-time financial point of view. Strange that Fortune should appear to be this shortsighted.

Collaboration, business and democracy

2009-01-05T08:32:00.001Z

I am working on a couple of "what's next" projects about corporate networks and communities, and this post by Jon Husband (The New Management - Bringing Democracy and Markets Inside the Organization), really struck me as very accurate.

One of the key milestones for widely and successfully deploying collaboration in an organization is the process for choosing a new governance charter. Basically, in my experience, after some pilot communities and networks have helped identify why and how a specific organization should deploy a collaborative way (to innovate further; to increase individual productivity; to bring its internal culture to the level of its employer brand; and so on), people start thinking about some key issues like:
- what name should we choose for this initiative,
- what rules should we have to organize our collaboration,
- how should HR processes change to take into account this new dimension ?

Bringing an answer to those questions is one of the key milestones to bring collaboration within the corporate culture. And, more than the answers themselves, it is how the organization choses to bring an answer to those issues (how it learns to think, design and decide collectively) that matters.

Why did Jon Husband post stricke me ? Well, I think we are at a time when the rules and governing principles of corporations are going to be built by the employees. That is, to my mind, somehow a move that "increases the democratic level" of the corporation.

Most governing principles used to come from power or from history: corporations internal organization codes and rules are mostly based on hierarchical decisions or on culture (the way we do things around here).

What I see now is quite different. Collaboration projects, and even more so if E2.0 tools are chosen and deployed wisely, can result in new rules and charters that have been collaboratively built and adopted. This is new and can be very powerful.

This is hapening. But we should not be too idealistic. I do not think this is about how the corporation will become a democracy (at least, not yet). I think it is about how the responsibility for the organization projects, performance and social role is more widely distributed and accepted than before.

By asking to build the rules, the employees are asking for more responsibility, and by launching these collaborative projects the organization is getting ready to share it. I could not say what will be the outcome of this. What I can say is that most corporations structure and processes will have to change deeply to benefit from this trend (see Martin's last post on Cisco for an example of change).

Christmas thoughts

2008-12-19T14:31:00.001Z

I am just about to leave for holydays, and was thinking about how 2008 is finishing. It actually started out pretty well for all of us engaged in "collaboration based change management" or "enterprise 2.0" development. But then, there was the credit crunch.

Simply put, somehow along the way trust disappeared, and the whole system started contracting. It is still contracting.

The question is, why did trust disappear ? Too complex a question to adress in a post. In here, I would only say that we do not believe the economy can go on growing at what was its pace in the past few years. Or, more precisely, that it cannot continue growing if it keeps the same structure and governing principles.

Isn't then this crisis a good moment to step back and act (not think) on those governing principles ? Based on the most visible reactions (governments and big business), it certainly does not seem so.

On the government front, billions have been poured into incumbant banks, financial institutions and industrial groups. Nothing has really been done to ensure that they will learn from past mistakes.

On the business front, we are getting ready to cope with the huge layoff frenzy that goes with this type of crisis (200 000 jobs to be lost in France according to Les Echos, even the tech layoffs are happening).

At the same time, there has been a lot of buzz arond how Enterprise 2.0 (to be overly simplistic) could have a positive impact in these times. For instance, putting down IT costs (as argued by Ross Dawson here) or even reinventing our business models (as argued in this interesting conversation led by Paula Thornton here)

And yes, I have to agree that all this "collaboration-based change" will have increased productivity of work (individual and collective) as its main impact for incumbent corporations. At the same time, and as argued in the post of Paula Thornton, business based on different business model and even different founding principles will emerge.

It's time that leaders started thinking big and forgetting about old recipes. I do not think they will work. In fact, I think we have just started a period that will end with bringing down two of the idols on which we have built our economy: growth for growth and financial value.

Poursuite du cycle E2.0 de Boostzone

2008-12-19T11:02:00.002Z

Suite aux deux premiers petits déjeuners sur l'entreprise 2.0 (transformation des usages et transformation de l'organisation), l'Institut organise le 9 janvier 2009 le dernier petit déjeuner de ce cycle, centré sur l'Innovation

Plus d'infos sur http://www.boostzone.fr/

Le dernier petit déjeuner, sur la transformation des organisations, avait aboutit au constat du nombre de questions encore ouvertes sur les transformations au cours. Le petit déjeuner du 9 janvier offre l'opportunité de répondre à quelques unes de ces questions sur le sujet de l'innovation.

Collaboration will push people management from execution to strategy

2008-12-12T14:28:00.001Z

I was with a client yesterday, thinking about how to bring collaboration skills (and awareness) to future leaders. Several points come to my mind after this conversation:

- This particular client has broken down its HR department: HR administration, social matters and people development are really managed by very different departments and people. This is pragmatic HR innovation to my mind !

- Putting the whole collaboration affair in the People department is a great approach, but one that should be managed carefully. When looking at collaboration through classic people development lenses, we are brought to think about classic people development services (using training and development to develop new usages, skills, technology skills, ...). That's important but clearly not enough.

In this approach, it is more important to find key issues on which to collaborate (and learn to better collaborate) than to identify "collaboration skills" that would afterwards be deployed through training. I think that training can only come as a support of a wider methodology.

The best way I know is to open collaborative spaces (communities or networks) and launch these communities or networks with minimal support (ensuring only consistency accross communities and in the support given). In these "people development communities", if issues are carefully chosen, people should be oriented towards working differently (contributing rather than producing; rating rather than evaluating; ....), and should be recognized and rewarded for so doing (not financially on a first step).

Why act this way ? The whole idea, to my mind, is not to try to impose standards tools (blogs, wikis, feeds, microblogs, ...) or average skills, but to bring the employees to discover the ways that match their needs - that is, that help them solve business issues.

The people development department will not be deciding which are the key skills or competencies to develop, it will rather be building an advanced "framework for collaboration", in which employees will test and invent the new ways of working that make sense for their particular business (that match their industry, culture, processes).

Discovering how to manage the collective side of people development is one of HR paths to value creation.

After the crisis: the new or the old ?

2008-12-05T15:51:00.001Z

I have been reading several posts lately about how the 2.0 (for want of a better name) could be what we need to go out of the crisis (here, here).

I think the question is even more important. By adressing the crisis wih the same state of mind and methods that we use to have, only at a bigger scale, are we not reproducing the same behaviours that took us where we are ?

By pouring money into ailing banks or carmakers what are we saving ? Jobs ? Or are we preserving a model that has proven its limits ? Time will say.

But in the corporations that are going to come out of the crisis, I think it is the leaders responsibility to innovate in management and governance, or at least to be able to recognize their limits if they are reaching them. We are probably at a paradigm change in management (and in society). For those that recognize it, it is a great opportunity.

People centered organizations

2008-12-05T15:04:00.001Z

I re-read recently a couple of posts by Stowe Boyd, on his notion that "the individual is the new group" (here).

Stowe's point, as I understand it, is that the important thing for the new social tools is giving people the ability to form the groups they need at the moment they need them (Stowe says this much better and in more detail). This implies that groups (the vast majority of them) are short lived and serve a specific purpose. I think this should also be the case for networks and communities even though their purpose is often more complex and they are therefore longer-lived.

More importantly, I think this kind of thinking greatly illustrates the kind of organization that are emerging today: organizations centered on people. Organizations that give every employee the ability to organize the resources she needs, at the moment she needs them, in order to do her job (think, execute, share, solve problems, ...). And today, resources means talent resources, that is fellow employees.

And I think this goes way beyond tools (which are key):
- It means ensuring that employees have the sense of responsibility that is needed to go beyond the existing boundaries of the organization (geography, product, hierarchy, ...);
- It means ensuring that the employees that are able to break boundaries in the interest of the business are proprely recognized (I have already talked about how to reinvent assessment and development systems here),
- It means ensuring that employees have the skills and behaviors needed to be able to work in different environments (we call these collaborative models), hierarchical, community of practice, peer network, functional network, ...
- It also means ensuring that leadership at organizations recognizes the potential of these new ways of working and of organizing and that they go the whole way they need to go to adapt their own individual and leadership styles.

E2.0 ratings or Peer People Reviews : should companies change their development and evaluation processes ?

2008-10-26T19:53:00.002Z

In a conversation launched a month ago by Andrew McAfee in this post, and continued last week through this post, there was a lot of buzz on whether it was a good idea or not to measure E2.0 participation of knowledge workers. I tend to agree with Andrew McAfee that measuring E2.0 activities would "encourage and increase participation and contributions". And I think we are looking at a major change opportunity.

I would first like to stress that E2.0 ratings should be linked to a correctly organized peer network or community (in a post last week, I pointed out that we call these Collaborative Models at the Boostzone Institute). If ratings are allowed from any employee in the company, I am worried that it will be a long time before they are taken into account by management for decision making. But within a peer network, these ratings can become a powerful tool for expertise recognition. In a interesting article from HBR, Creativity and the Role of the Leader, Diego Rodriguez, a partner from IDEO, points out that "contributing to an interdependent network is its own reward". I would go further, as Andrew McAfee does, and say that ratings can encourage friendly competition and self-improvement.

The change opportunity I am pointing at is how these E2.0 ratings could become the basis for network or comunity management.

In a very classical view of HR, how would E2.0 ratings be considered ? As the measurement of an employee's performance in using E2.0 tools ? Probably. The reality is slightly more complicated. E2.0 ratings should be used to start building Peer People Reviews (PPR).

In classic People Reviews, a particular employee is given a triple assessment of himself: her performance, her potential for evolution at her current employer, her "development needs". This triple assessment is based on a hierarchical view of the organization: people are assessed by their managers, based on performance management systems that are deployed down hierarchical lines and on skill frameworks that, more often than not, are built top-down by HR teams.

I think these People Reviews are particularly well adapted to developing managers within a hierarchical organization. Most other systems (mobility, rewards) are based on this one. As for 360° assessment and other more "democratic" assessment systems, they are still management-designed tools and are far from the peer potential of E2.0 ratings.

Peer People Reviews, that is E2.0 ratings, to my mind, would be different from classic people reviews in at least two dimensions. From a process point of view, they are continuous assessment processes, continuously evolving as network member work activity produces additional ratings. From a content point of view, the ratings are very different from performance indicators or skills description. These, in classic people reviews, are designed in advance. In Peer People Reviews, only the rating categories can be designed: the content of the ratings will continuously evolve also, based on the evolution of content development by the network. And therefore, assuming that the peer network has a clear link with value creation, the ratings become a great indicator for network performance.

In the same HBR article mentioned above, the authors say that "one doesn't manage creativity. One manages for creativity". I would use the same approach to say that an organization does not manage community or network performance: an organization can only build the environment for community or network performance.

Individual People Reviews should be used to drive individual managers development, while Peer People Reviews should become a "common way of working" within any collaborative model. Building the framework for the Peer People Review and continuously monitoring it is management work.

Centripetal web ... and centripetal networks ?

2008-10-20T22:11:00.002+01:00

Another very good article by Nicholas Carr.

In this one, he argues that, more and more, the web is going to revolve around "large objects" (that is popular websites or blogs): "Yes, we still journey out to the far reaches of the still-expanding info-universe, but for most of us, most of the time, the World Wide Web has become a small and comfortable place".

It is a very interesting article, as, to my mind, it also points towards the web becoming a real new geography, that will therefore need some regulation (amènagement du territoire).

Think of the web as a new geography. It is good to remember that real geography also revolves around cities where most exchanges are done and value created. Other lands need the support of the state to be able to develop their economic activity (in interventionist countries) or else they may decay (as is the case for suburbs in developed or developing economies alike).

I think the web will also organize around the places where most of the exchange is done and value created. At the fringes, risk takers (with some free time), will be able to find sources of creativity, new ideas, innovation, ...

And some regulation will be needed so that blogs and websites that are not maintained are not just discarded but that they remain alive and can be explored by future explorers, and that people are able to live their virtual lives far from the center of the information-universe.

I think something similar could happen with social networks. One or two very large SN will cumulate most of the traffic, while valuable, innovative, thought-provoking SN will not emerge due to a lack of ... people!

Managing the revolution ... through HR

2008-10-12T21:07:00.001+01:00

Again, a very good article in HBR on mass collaboration. This one, written by Scott Cook from Intuit, gives me the opportunity to explain why this "user contribution revolution" is a unique opportunity for HR departments to reinvent themselves.

In the article, Scott Cook urges companies to identify and build "user contribution systems" that allow to benefit from the contributions of people outside of corporate boundaries. His examples, now quite well known, are drawn from Hyatt, Procter & Gamble or Honda as well as Google, Amazon or Wikipedia. He understands "user contribution systems" are "methods for aggregating and leveraging people's contributions or behaviours in ways that are useful to other people".

My first reaction to the article was to say: isn't any corporation a "user contribution system" ? I know I am pushing the idea, as Scott Cook states that in a user contribution system the company doesn't stand between the input (from people) and the output (their contributions, aggregated and leveraged by an ad hoc system).

But still, the corporate model is basically intended to organize people cooperation to deliver a higher value added service or good. True, users (in this case employees) are paid for so doing. Sometimes, as in insurance and particularly mutual insurance, "user contribution systems" seem to be at the heart of the business model. Mutual companies have built systems that profit from the contributions (risk profiles) of their clients to deliver to them a very specific service (protection against the risks of life).

So, what is this "user contribution system" teaching us ? Our own idea here at Bostzone is that we are discovering and professionalizing new collaboration models, new ways of organizing and collaborating. I have seen, as Scott Cook says, how countercultural this "user contribution paradigm is". If we go deeper, countercultural only means that collaborating anyway else than through known models (hierarchy or projects), seems to challenge beliefs about the role of hierarchy and authority. And rightly so. The new collaboration models will run through other channels than hierarchy. Their funding principles will not be, as they were in the hierarchical model, command and control.

As many have already stated (Lowell Bryan in Mobilizing Minds, for instance), this is a revolution in organization. It started when the matrix model was invented and continued with reengineering, communities of practice or project modes.

This revolution will be harder to drive at the individual level. We can already see employees needing to be at the same time a manager, a member of a community of practice and a project team member. This is difficult in itself. All the more difficult if, most times, any contribution other than the hierarchical one, is not, or not well enough, taken into account.

Why did I say this was an opportunity for HR to reinvent itself ? Well, HR basic process are built to identify, attract and, above all, assess and develop people within a hierarchical organization. Hence the extreme difficulty for many HR functions to devise adapted programs for experts or transversal populations. Most HR systems are based on a "do not hold me accountable for what I can't control" view of the world. This is particularly true for most annual review processes, that have a difficult time including peer assessment or network assessment anyway else than as a "complement" to line assessment.

HR is invited to reconsider all dimensions of its people development organization:
- Competency or skill frameworks. These are oriented (towards higher hierarchy or higher expertise) and static (evolution is not built within their fabric). It is likely that such systems will not be adapted for employees that will spend their careers switching between collaboration models;
- Development and assessment systems. These have been designed based on hierarchical organizations. They are selective by nature and often result in companies having to choose between two talents (in these scarcity times!). These systems and processes will need to expand and develop new dimensions. I can already see processes that extend beyond corporate boundaries.
- Talent development skills of employees. This is to my mind the most critical aspect of the people development organization of any company. Most of the times, the talent development responsibility has rested with HR and management. It is important that it know becomes a shared and collective responsibility.

Big times ahead for the HR function.

Le web 2.0 et son impact sur l'entreprise

2008-10-09T09:13:00.001+01:00

Le 15 mars prochain, à l'association des anciens de Sciences Po, j'aurai le plaisir d'animer avec Yann Mauchamp une séance sur le sujet de l'impact du web 2.0 sur l'entreprise, et notamment sur son organisation et sur la fonction RH.

Pour ceux d'entre vous qui comptent y participer, nous sommes preneurs, Yann et moi, de vos remarques et questions, pour inclure dans notre travail les sujets qui vous intéressent le plus.

Vous pouvez répondre à ce billet pour nous communiquer ces remarques ou, pour les membres de Boostzone, lancer les conversations que vous jugez pertinentes dans le Cercle.

Au plaisir de vous croiser le 15 !

Death of the Dinos, ou l'opportunité qui vient avec la crise

2008-09-24T06:54:00.002+01:00

Je suis depuis longtemps le blog FastFoward, intéressant et ludique.

Dans une récent article, Death of the Dinos, intéressant et amusant à lire, Rob Paterson souligne que la crise de crédit et la révolution dans le coût des transports sont des conditions favorables à l'apparition de l'entreprise 2.0.

Il y a même une approche intéressante de ce qu'est une entreprise 2.0 : "The new will be based on network models. It will use the network effect and it will use social capital to do big things. It will use its distributed intelligence to “see” what to do and to understand the chaos that we will be living in".

Par rapport à l'article, je suis plus mesuré, dans le sens où le changement sera moins brutal qu'à "la chute d'un astéroide". Mais il est certain que les difficultés de gestion actuelles sont une opportunité pour les entreprises embarquées dans des projets 2.0 de construire des avantages compétitifs décisifs.

Ce que je vois dans mon activité, c'est que les collaborateurs des entreprises perçoivent très rapidement les bénéfices qu'ils peuvent tirer de la transformation en cours. Ce qui fait de cette période de transformation une période très différente par rapport aux précédentes, c'est que les équipes de management, les dirigeants, ne sont pas en train de conduire un changement top-down, mais bien d'orchestrer une transformation en profondeur, dans laquelle les initiatives sont prises à tous les niveaux.

Identifier les initiatives les plus pertinentes, fixer des priorités parmi les initiatives, déléguer la responsabilité des projets, admettre de s'adapter aux changements suggérés par la base, challenger les idées reçues (notamment en termes de technologie et de ressources humaines), assurer les synergies entre tous les projets de type 2.0 qui émergent aujourd'hui dans les entreprises, voilà quelques uns des défis auxquels sont confrontés des équipes de management qui n'ont pas toujours été formées pour cela.

Transformer les usages des réseaux sociaux en usages professionnels, un avantage concurrentiel ?

2008-09-19T15:44:00.003+01:00

Il y a une forte tendance ces jours-ci à la transformation des outils de réseaux sociaux en outils professionnels. Par exemple, ces (ici et ici) quelques outils qui transforment twitter pour l'entreprise ou le monde académique.

La transformation des usages sociaux pour les adapter au monde de l'entreprise est moins simple qu'il n'y parait. Bien sûr, tout le monde souligne le potentiel des réseaux sociaux dans l'entreprise, en termes d'innovation ou de productivité individuelle, par exemple.

Mais lorsque nous passons du réseau social ouvert, où nous échangeons avec des amis, vers les "corporate social networks", où nous sommes censés travailler avec des collègues, rien n'est plus pareil.

C'est pourquoi, à mon sens, l'adoption de ces nouveaux outils ne pourra pas se faire sans:

Une vraie réflexion sur l'impact de ces outils pour l'amélioration des modes de travail collectif des entreprises,
Une réflexion sur l'impact que ces nouveaux outils ont sur la culture existante des entreprises.

En termes d'adoption, ce n'est pas simplement d'usages qu'il faudra s'occuper. Ces nouveaux outils ont un très fort potentiel en termes de transversalité, et donc de remise en cause de certains échelons hiérarchiques ou de certains rôles (le rôle de courroie de transmission du management intermédiaire, pour prendre un exemple).

Dès lors, c'est d'une vraie remise en cause de l'organisation qu'il s'agit. Et nous sommes donc dans un projet de transformation, sans doute assez profonde.

Cette transformation ne concerne pas au premier chef les processus de l'entreprise, qui seront certes impactés, mais plutôt indirectement. Elle concerne les modes de travail individuel et collectif, en quelque sorte, l'arrivée de la collaboration comme nouveau paradigme de management.

Le potentiel en termes d'avantages concurrentiels à construire est immense, de même nature que celui qu'ont construit à d'autres époques certains grands groupes (GE, Allied Signal, Valeo, pour prendre quelques exemples) reconnus pour la qualité de leurs systèmes de management.

LinkedIn+NYTimes : intégrer l'information et les réseaux sociaux ?

2008-07-22T16:34:00.004+01:00

Une nouvelle du jour qui est censée faire du bruit: l'intégration de LinkedIn et NYTimes (commentée ici et ici, par exemple), pour le plus grand bonheur des membres. A mon sens, ceci est plus du niveau de l'effet d'annonce. La valeur sera plutôt dans l'utilisation qui est faite par les entreprises de cette intégration, comme j'explique plus bas.

L'idée à priori est séduisante, et d'ailleurs, c'est déjà une réalité dans certaines entreprises: lier le contenu non seulement au profil individuel, mais aussi au profil social (aux réseaux auxquels j'appartiens et aux contenus les mieux "notés" par ce réseau).

Pourtant, on peut questionner ce "platform-level collaborative filtering". Je peux comprendre que le filtre appliqué par le réseau est plus "intelligent" que le news-feed que j'organiserai tout seul, selon mes intérêts. Ca va dans le sens du "Wisdom of Crowds", mais en dehors de faire du buzz pour LinkedIn et pour le NYTimes, j'avoue avoir du mal à comprendre ce que moi, LinkedIn member, j'ai à y gagner, sauf à supposer que je sois un utilisateur très actif de LinkedIn, qui devienne en quelque sorte mon point d'accès privilégié vers le net.

Ce qui me semble plus intéressant, si on suit le raisonnement de Ross Dawson, c'est ce genre de démarche en entreprise. Selon votre position dans l'organisation, votre rôle, votre fonction, vous recevez des informations, du contenu, qui vous est particulièrement adapté. On y est déjà d'ailleurs dans certaines entreprises, et c'est une bonne façon de diffuser de la culture d'entreprise, de l'information d'intérêt général, voire de l'information pour experts, si le système est suffisamment fin.

Si on arrive, dans ce genre de systèmes qui se mettent en place, à réserver une place à l'innovation et aux idées "venues d'ailleurs", on devrait arriver à avoir une diffusion de l'information et du contenu de premier plan (un exemple trouvé sur le blog "The AppGap", Spigit).

On aurait construit un continuum entre la génération de l'idée (qui est humaine) et sa transformation et postérieure utilisation.

Un double préalable, à mon sens, à l'exploitation de cet environnement de travail de rêve:

Une culture qui pousse les individus à se servir de ces contenus comme leviers pour travailler ensemble; il ne suffit pas que l'information vienne jusqu'à moi pour qu'elle soit utilisable. Il faut que je puisse savoir qui l'a produite, et dans quelle contexte. Et d'ailleurs, dans mon expérience, le vrai transfer d'information, voire de compétence, se fera au téléphone ou en direct;
La capacité de l'organisation à remettre en cause cet environnement dès qu'il devient trop stable. Je pense que, aujourd'hui, la valeur pour les entreprises réside aussi bien dans l'innovation que dans la rapidité à transformer cette innovation en services puis en profits. L'environnement de travail créé est formidable dans l'exécution, mais je crains qu'il ne puisse qu'aller dans le sens contraire à l'innovation sans une véritable culture entrepreuneuriale.

Quel travail, quels talents, quel Google ?

2008-06-13T10:55:00.006+01:00

Encore une fois, Nicholas Carr nage à contre-courant. Son article sur Google et l'intelligence (Is Google Making Us Stupid), est surtout une formidable ouverture à toute une série de commentaires (allez voir son blog !) qui disent en substance la même chose : nous ne savons plus lire un livre ! surfer le web 2.0 nous rend différents ! que sommes-nous devenus ?

En fait, nous ne savons pas très bien où nous en sommes. Ces évolutions technologiques et sociales qui s'accélèrent nous mettent sous pression : il faudrait lire, surfer, blogger, twitter, jouer, répondre sur des forums, contribuer à des blogs, lire wikipedia, ..., et arriver malgré tout à avoir une véritable activité professionnelle, une vie sociale et une vie personnelle ! Dur. Mais pas impossible.

Voilà où nous en sommes (l'image est utilisée par Dominique pour parler de l'état du savoir sur les réseaux sociaux...) ! Au tout début de quelque chose, mais sans savoir très bien ce qu'est ce quelque chose et ce qui arrive derrière.

J'ai deux convictions par rapport à cette vague (sociale) ou à cet iceberg:

C'est une bonne idée d'essayer, de tester ces nouvelles formes de communication. Ca permet de suivre les évolutions. Mais je me rappelle aussi que l'évolution des usages est postérieure à l'évolution des technologies. Je suis assez persuadé que la génération qui arrive va trouver les bons usages pour cette foule de nouveaux moyens de communication et collaboration;
Ce moyens de communication offrent un grand potentiel aux entreprises. Un potentiel d'ingénierie en termes de travail et de formation qui est l'un des fondements de leurs avantages compétitifs à l'avenir.

Je m'explique sur le deuxième sujet. Les différentes formes de lecture/pensée dont parle Carr sont pour moi utiles dans des contextes et pour des utilisations différentes. On doit être capable d'être un bon blogger sans pour autant perdre sa capacité à lire (d'ailleurs, Carr lui-même doit encore se rappeler comment lire pour être capable d'écrire ses livres).

Disposer de cette diversité de compétences complémentaires est une richesse pour une entreprise dans une économie du savoir. Il faudra simplement pouvoir "organiser" le travail entre l'analyse de données, la diffusion d'informations, la recherche d'expertise, la résolution de problèmes, l'exercice de créativité, l'exercice de créativité collective ou brainstorming, ... Et on voit bien que les outils que nous apprenons (peut-être lentement?) à utiliser aujourd'hui, vont nous être très utiles pour devenir meilleurs dans l'exercice de ces nouvelles compétences.

Les directions des ressources humaines ont à mon sens une vraie mission dans le contexte actuel: s'approprier et diffuser ces outils de travail (individuel et collectif) puis organiser le travail de leurs collaborateurs, pour une meilleure efficacité collective. Et ils seront obligés, pour réussir, d'organiser aussi le développement et la formation de leurs collaborateurs dans ces domaines.

Si je parle de mission, c'est pour deux raisons. Première raison, les modalités d'utilisation collective de ces nouveaux outils seront des éléments importants de la culture d'entreprise. Mission donc de préservation ou renforcement de leur culture, mais aussi de construction d'un avantage compétitif.

Deuxième raison, la diffusion de ces outils est rapide, comme nous le voyons. Il existe un risque certain de cassure professionnelle entre ceux qui sauront utiliser ces outils et les autres. Mission ici d'information auprès de leurs collaborateurs.

Et n'oublions pas. Tous ces nouveaux services ou moyens de communication ne sont que des outils, c'est-à-dire des instruments auxquels on donne sens en les utilisant. Google est un outil. Ce que je ne sais pas encore c'est, est-ce un outil individuel (un outil de recherche) ou un outil collectif (un outil qui favorise la réflexion collective) ? Pour l'entreprise, le risque à investir rapidement ces nouveaux terrains, sans avoir bien défini les conditions d'utilisation, est faible, car, à l'avenir, elle devra déployer des outils de travail individuel aussi bien que des outils d'intelligence collective.

Elle peut laisser aux Ressources Humaines le soin de donner un sens à ces nouveaux outils collaboratifs.

Une évolution générique de l'entreprise 2.0 ?

2008-05-29T21:21:00.004+01:00

Encore un "knowledge café" passionnant à l'Institut Boostzone. Il y était question cette fois-ci d'évolution de la fonction communication. Les conclusions feront l'objet d'un article sur le site de l'institut très prochainement.

Parmi ces conclusions, le besoin pour la fonction communication de développer les compétences de communicant de chaque collaborateur de l'entreprise. Ce qui me rappelle ce que je dis depuis longtemps dans le cadre de Talent Club: faire de la gestion du talent une compétence clé de l'organisation, c'est-à-dire, de chaque collaborateur de l'organisation.

Je crois que c'est là l'une des évolutions génériques qui poussent vers l'entreprise 2.0. Je m'explique: dans l'entreprise 2.0, l'individu (en tant que collaborateur mais aussi en tant qu'individu) est central; l'identifier, le connaître, lui donner les moyens de s'exprimer professionnellement et de se développer, notamment en collaborant largement au sein de cette entreprise, seront des tendances de fonds de cette "entreprise 2.0";

Mais, plus concrètement, de quelle façon le développement professionnel (qui ne comprend pas que la formation) est-il différent dans l'entreprise 2.0 ? Je dirais que l'entreprise mobilise toutes ses ressources au bénéfice de l'activité et du développement de ses collaborateurs (ce qui est particulièrement visible pour les fonctions centrales) et ce faisant elle ne vise pas à les enfermer dans un système mais à leur donner un cadre.

C'est pourquoi la fonction RH et la fonction communication évoluent de façon semblable. A mon sens, dans les prochaines années, nous verrons l'évolution suivante. Pour la RH, il ne s'agira plus de définir de façon centrale les compétences clé, ou les programmes de formation, par exemple, mais plutôt de s'assurer que chaque collaborateur place le développement professionnel (le sien et celui de ses pairs et collaborateurs) au centre de ses préoccupations, et qu'il a les moyens d'agir dessus. Plus que définir un référentiel de compétences, on commence aujourd'hui à former les managers au développement de leurs collaborateurs. Et un développement qui soit en cohérence avec la stratégie de l'entreprise.

L'évolution devrait être parallèle, et sans doute plus visible, pour la fonction communication. Plutôt que s'évertuer à construire des messages, à "faire le travail" de communication pour les différents départements d'une entreprise, la communication aura pour mission de déployer les compétences de communication à tous les employés de l'entreprise, et de s'assurer évidemment d'une certaine cohérence. Il ne s'agit plus, par exemple, de faire le blog de l'entreprise, mais de créer un écosystème de blogs. Pour réussir, la fonction communication devra travailler sur la cohérence (mais on est déjà en "meta") et surtout sur les compétences de "blogueur" de ceux qui auront été choisis et voudront tenir ce rôle. Et il ne s'agira pas de m'importe quelles compétences, mais bien de ces compétences de communication qui définissent la culture de cette entreprise.

Dans cette tendance, la fonction finance me semble être très en avance. Dans bien des entreprises, le langage financier, les indicateurs clé sont connus des managers, qui en ont fait un élément fondateur du jargon d'entreprise. Ce sera de plus en plus le cas avec les autres compétences clé de l'entreprise. Demain, chaque collaborateur sera équipé avec les moyens d'agir sur les processus clé de l'entreprise (vision financière, capacité de communication, compétences de développement des collaborateurs, connaissance métier, ...). Ce qui semble en l'écrivant relativement banale ne sera une réalité que lorsque l'on aura accepté de mettre les individus au centre de l'entreprise, lorsque l'on aura compris que chaque individu peut bénéficier de toute la richesse que recèle l'entreprise.

Evidemment, tout cela présuppose que l'on sache collaborer ...

Sommes-nous prêts pour la révolution du leadership ?

2008-05-19T11:40:00.005+01:00

Perceptible pour moi depuis plusieurs mois, le bruit sur la révolution du leadership s'est accentué ces dernières semaines. Je me demande si nous sommes en France prêts à y participer.

La nature du leadership pourrait être en train de changer. Prenez cet article de HBR (Leadership's Online Labs), abondamment commenté déjà. La thèse de l'article de HBR est simple: les MMORPGs (jeux en ligne massivement multi-joueur) demandent des aptitudes de leadership qui pourraient se généraliser dans les entreprises dans les années à venir. Les enseignements à mon sens les plus intéressants :

"Leadership in games is a task, not an identity (...) Games do not foster the expectation that leadership roles last forever". L'article met en avant la notion de leadership partiel (sur certaines tâches, projets ou périodes de temps), par opposition à la notion de leader plus classique, notion selon laquelle les leaders de demain sont les hauts potentiels d'aujourd'hui, lorsqu'ils auront été convenablement développés. Iconoclaste, l'article bat en brèche cette notion classique.

Il est facile d'admettre que, à côté du leader charismatique, d'autres personnes exerceront leur leadership de façon plus restreinte. C'est déjà le cas dans les projets (change leaders), le savoir (thought leader), les équipes (team leader) ... Ce qui est plus intéressant à mon sens c'est la capacité qui est demandée à chacun de savoir reconnaître le leadership d'un autre dans une situation donnée, et surtout, la capacité qui est demandée aux entreprises de développer et manager un véritable leadership distribué.

Le même article continue : "Getting the leadership environment right may be at least as important to an organization as choosing the right people to lead". Cette intuition des auteurs vient des réponses des joueurs interrogés eux-mêmes ("if you want better leadership, why not trying to change the game instead of trying to change the leaders?"). Cette intuition m'est plus familière. Je suis convaincu que certaines entreprises ont depuis longtemps compris cette notion et sont capables de trouver les collaborateurs qui pourront s'épanouir dans l'environnement professionnel qu'elles ont créé (McKinsey ou Allied Signal, par exemple).

Mais ce qui est somme toutes atteignable dans une entreprise de conseil peut-il être réalisé rapidement dans une entreprise industrielle ? Et si on admet que les types de leadership vont se démultiplier, comment créer cet environnement capable de fabriquer les leaders dont les entreprises ont besoin ?

Si on revient à la vieille définition (leadership : doing the right thing; management : doing things right), on peut simplement admettre que la complexité croissante de notre économie et nos organisations demande un nombre croissant de leaders, et de types différents.

Trouver un nombre croissant de leaders ? La question ne se limite pas au très commenté "War for Talent". La question serait plutôt, "search for talent". A mon sens, la recherche de nouveaux leaders (de nouveaux employés au sens large, d'ailleurs) est assez limitée, d'un point de vue psychologique. Nous sommes encore empêtrés dans des schémas mentaux hérités du taylorisme:

je définis un poste de travail, après avoir compris l'organisation;
je définis les compétences nécessaires à la réussite dans ce poste;
je recherche, je sélectionne et j'évalue en me fondant sur ces critères.

Attention, je ne critique pas sans savoir le recrutement (quelques années de chasse de tête me poussent plutôt à défendre cette fonction). Mais je constate que nous ne sommes pas encore passés dans ce que devrait être le recrutement dans un monde collaboratif, et en évolution constante: le co-développement d'un impact personnel sur une organisation (et j'admets volontiers que ceci ne s'applique pas à tout le monde, mais c'est de leaders dont on parle...).

On pourra lire aussi ce que Linda Hill a à dire sur le sujet.

Trouver ou développer différents types de leaders ? J'ai pu lire sur Boostzone récemment différents articles sur l'évolution de la pensée, les nouvelles compétences et leur vitesse d'obsolescence, entre autres. Je me disais que ce que nous sommes en train de demander à nos dirigeants est d'admettre une façon de diriger sans doute profondément différente de la leur. Je sais que "savoir s'entourer" est l'une des qualités distinctives du bon leader ou dirigeant.... mais n'avons-nous pas là atteint la limite ?

Où en sommes-nous sur ce sujet en France ? Qu'en est-il de notre capacité à apporter notre pierre à ce nouveau leadership ? Organisations hiérarchiques et éducation élitiste, c'est souvent ce que l'on retient de notre modèle de "talent production". Pouvons-nous changer ces deux modèles pour faire émerger et pour développer les leaders dont nous avons déjà besoin ? Sans oublier que, lorsque nous aurons compris cette évolution du leadership, l'impact que ces leaders (et les talents en général) ont sur nos organisations, lorsque nous saurons où chercher et comment trouver ces leaders, il nous faudra aussi changer la façon d'organiser leur travail, de les développer et de les rémunérer.

Travail 2.0 - le colloque de la Fabrique du Futur

2008-05-19T07:08:00.003+01:00

La Fabrique du Futur a organisé un colloque sur le travail du futur (Au delà du Travail 2.0). Merci à Eric, Nicole et Miguel pour un évènement très réussi. Les différentes interventions et comptes-rendus peuvent être vues ici et des photos ici.

J'ai moi-même participé à une table de travail sur la "RH 2.0" avec Macha ARFEN, François DENIEUL, Catherine GALL et Nicolas REAU. Je reprends ici le compte-rendu de cette table de travail, qui a été très productive:

Autour de la question "Quel espace de recrutement pour engager et développer des femmes de talent ?", notre réflexion s'est organisée autour de points suivants:

Evolution de la notion de recrutement : ne doit-on pas évoluer du très connu "attirer les meilleurs" vers "engager et maintenir une relation avec des individus sur différentes dimensions" (professionnelle, sociale, personnelle, ...);
Espace de recrutement : besoin de travailler sur le lieu des premières interactions entre une entreprise et des "candidats"; il est notamment intéressant de s'interroger sur l'esthétique de l'espace de recrutement pour évaluer son lien avec celle de l'entreprise; un espace peut-il s'adapter aux candidats pour les mettre en situation d'exprimer leurs aptitudes et potentiel ?
Ne doit-on pas profiter de l'impact que peuvent avoir des valeurs féminines pour faire évoluer le processus de recrutement ? Ne doit-on pas passer d'un processus fondé sur l'évaluation à un processus fondé sur la collaboration et la co-construction ?
De quelle façon différents fondements du marché du travail sont-ils un frein à l'évolution du recrutement (et donc, par extension de toute la relation entreprise - individu) ? Le caractère élitiste de l'éducation nationale et la survalorisation du diplôme sont-elles encore concevables à l'époque de la collaboration ? L'évaluation fondée sur le poste de travail (organisations tayloriennes) est-elle concevable à une époque d'accélaration du changement ?

Cette table de travail devrait poursuivre virtuellement ses échanges ici. On espère qu'ils seront productifs. Un concours sur l'espace de recrutement 2.0 est aussi à l'étude, on espère aussi qu'il aboutira.

Les nouvelles navigations professionnelles

2008-04-16T20:50:00.002+01:00

Matinée fort intéressante à l'Institut Boostzone. On y a parlé des nouvelles navigations professionnelles, sous trois angles, celui d'une révolution dans la mobilité, celui d'un nouveau partage de la valeur entre les entreprises et les individus et celui de la nécessaire évolution du cadre contractuel.

En dehors des participants les plus réguliers (Dominique, Martin), nous avons compté avec la présence et le soutien de Jean et Loic. L'Institut réalisera un petit article sur la substance de la journée, et développera cette substance dans le cadre de ses universités NCM. Je voulais quand à moi revenir sur les aspects qui m'ont le plus marqué :

L'évolution de la recherche académique avec, potentiellement, le remplacement du concept de compétences par celui de "knowings". Statique, le concept de compétence avait du mal à rendre compte de la dynamique professionnelle. C'est un sujet que j'ai étudié et pratiqué au sein de Talent Club, et la découverte de cette idée de knowings est un soulagement. Simplement expliqué, cela revient à remplacer la compétence (définie, statique, mesurable), par des axes de savoir en mouvement perpétuel (d'où l'emploi du gérondif en anglais). Cette idée aura du mal à être rapidement intégrée dans les systèmes RH, qui sont encore aujourd'hui fondés, informatiquement, sur des référentiels de compétences. Mais elle a le potentiel de sortir le domaine RH de son isolement pour le lier concrètement à la stratégie de l'entreprise à travers la gestion du savoir, des communautés et des experts (la gestion des compétences n'a vraiment prouvé sa valeur que comme référentiel managérial collectif, à mon sens).
La distinction qui a commencé à être faite, notamment par Hervé, entré les concepts de valeur et de performance. Nos entreprises veulent créer de la valeur, mais, au niveau individuel, elles gèrent de la performance. La différence est loin d'être anodine. Gérer la performance des individus, et notamment dans les systèmes en place actuellement, laisse peu de place au développement de leur valeur professionnelle, surtout si on a une vision tant soit peu moderne de ce concept de valeur professionnelle individuelle (créativité, rigueur, capacité relationnelle, capital santé, capital social, réseau social, ...). Et il va de soi que c'est sur le développement de cette valeur que peut se construire la performance future.

Nous avions poussé l'année dernière à l'AFPLANE le thème du capital humain (voir aussi mon article sur le sujet). Les réactions des professionnels de la finance et de la RH avaient été mesurées devant nos propositions d'élargir le cadre conceptuel, notamment financier, pour donner toute sa place au capital humain dans la réflexion sur la création de valeur dans l'entreprise.

La séance de ce matin a été de ce point de vue beaucoup plus positive. Moins théorique et plus pragmatique, notre approche aboutit à un repositionnement de la question RH au centre du développement économique, de l'entreprise mais aussi, plus largement, des territoires. De plus en plus, le développement professionnel individuel et collectif apparaît comme le fondement de la valeur future des entreprises, mais surtout, de la valeur et de la richesse des territoires où nous vivons (retour du réel en ce monde du 2.0 ...).

Les conversations dans l'antichambre de sortie tournaient autour de ce qu'il faut changer : l'éducation nationale, la focalisation sur l'élitisme, le style de leadership dans nos sociétés, les fondements du système RH et enfin les liens entre talent et capital.

Bien des choses à faire, mais de plus en plus de convaincus.

Un nouveau lien entreprise - individus ?

2008-04-10T09:47:00.002+01:00

Le 16 avril, l'Institut Boostzone tiendra son deuxième atelier de travail pour 2008, "Les Nouvelles Navigations Professionnelles"

Nous travaillerons autour des questions suivantes:

Les réseaux sociaux et la révolution du 2.0 sont-ils en train de redéfinir la nature du lien entre l'entreprise et les individus ?
Ne sommes-nous pas en train de rentrer dans un nouveau monde, en termes de création de valeur et de partage de cette valeur entre les entreprises et ses collaborateurs ?

La première question a trait à la mobilité, et elle est plus complexe qu'elle n'y parait en première approche:

Que la mobilité professionnelle soit explosive semble un fait aujourd'hui couramment admis: la mobilité est géographique, fonctionnelle, hiérarchique, industrielle, poussée par un environnement très compétitif d'un côté et par une tendance d'un nombre croissant d'entre nous à poursuivre nos propres projets personnels et professionnelles;
Un fait qui semble moins clair aujourd'hui c'est que l'entreprise est arrivée au bout de sa logique d'optimisation. Tous les "gisements de productivité" ayant été actionnés, les salariés restant dans les entreprises sont de plus en plus indispensables, comme le prouve la focalisation de ces dernières sur les problèmes de rétention;
La mobilité est aujourd'hui aussi intellectuelle (continuous partial attention), un point qui est difficilement géré par les entreprises, notamment dans le cas des experts les plus pointus. Ceci n'est pas un phénomène négatif, mais probablement, au contraire, un signe de nouvelles façons d'apprendre et de partager qui se développent dans la sphère sociale, et que l'entreprise doit apprendre à intégrer.

D'un point de vue de la valeur du travail et du partage de la valeur, nous sommes au sein d'une tendance plus large, à mon sens, qui est celle de la valorisation des actifs immatériels. Les questions posées sont pratiquement subversives !

Dans une économie où l'innovation prend de plus en plus d'importance, et dans laquelle les moyens de transformer une innovation en services abondent (capital risque, marchés virtuels, peer networks, concours d'idées lancés par des entreprises, ...), que devient l'apport d'un expert dans son entreprise ? En préparant cet atelier hier avec Martin, nous nous posions la question, doit-il être rémunéré par un salaire ou comme un investisseur ?
Et qu'en est-il de l'investissement fait par les entreprises pour développer de nouveaux collaborateurs ? De l'investissement réalisé pour créer des environnements de travail innovants ? Est-ce encore une dépense qui va en P&L ou un investissement en capital ? Avons-nous aujourd'hui les bons outils comptables pour rendre compte des processus de création de valeur dans les entreprises ?
Et évidemment, si cette question est posée, se pose aussi celle du partage de la valeur créée.

A mon sens, ce petit débat sur le partage de la valeur deviendra grand. Et les entreprises qui prennent aujourd'hui les devants (voir Google...) construisent un avantage compétitif très solide.

Process 2.0

2008-03-19T15:14:00.003Z

Bertrand rappelle dans son blog une conversation passionnante que nous avons eu il y a quelques semaines: l'entreprise 2.0 va-t-elle éliminer les processus ?

Nous étions assez d'accord sur le fait que si entreprise 2.0 il y a, il s'agit plutôt d'une couche supplémentaire par rapport à l'organisation existante: celle qui permet à chacun de s'identifier, de partager et de collaborer facilement sans avoir recours à la hiérarchie et en dépassant les frontières traditionnelles.

Evidemment, cette couche ne va pas remplacer les processus. Elle devrait cependant permettre de les rendre plus agiles. Je m'explique: dans un processus, les personnes sont organisées en suivant la succession des activités de celui-ci. Et pour modifier un processus dont on se disait qu'il avait "du potentiel d'amélioration", on faisait classiquement appel à un consultant, qui, en quelques entretiens et pas mal de réflexion, proposait une remise à plat ... cher

Aujourd'hui, le phénomène collaboratif permet à tous les acteurs d'un processus de s'organiser en communauté. On passe d'une vision "process owner" à une vision "process owners" ... une petite lettre qui change tout.

En travaillant sur la capacité des process owners à collaborer (se faire confiance, partager leurs connaissances et perception sur le processus, demander de l'aide, accepter de l'aide, ...) on est de fait en train de passer d'une vision remise à plat des processus à une vision processus dynamique.

Ce qui est somme toute logique. Un processus est fait pour répondre aux besoins d'un client, interne ou externe. Et le rythme d'accélération de l'évolution de ces besoins ne va faire qu'accélérer.

Comme je le disais dans mon post précédent, il va falloir changer nos façons de travailler et nos façons de manager (lire à ce sujet l'article Leading From Behind sur HBR), et c'est cela qui va prendre du temps, plus que la mise en place de la structure entreprise 2.0. Comme toujours, d'abord les outils, ensuite les usages ...

Collaboration based change management

2007-12-17T17:33:00.000Z

Some quick thoughts on the next wave of change management, on which we are beginning to work

- First, it is as important as reengineering was. If then we changed the processes, now, we are going to change the way we collaborate ACCROSS processes (and more generally, the way we collaborate);
- Second, it is going to take as long as reengineering did. Uncovering processes and making them effective and efficient was a long road. Imagine about identifying key skills and knowledge, prompting people to making them visible, pushing people to call on others for help and problem solving, asking people to proactively share, help, collaborate;
- Third, it involves tools. Not the same tools though. ERP-like software was a good way to make processes visible and to control them. But now we need tools that help people make their own work more impactful and visible to others. It is not "command and control" software that we need, but "peer production" environments;
- Finally, it is all about web 2.0, enterprise2.0, ... I mean, it is collaboration based ! We need to invent new types of change management projects in which we invent the future as we go.

Then we changed the processes. Now we are going to change the culture. And that will not be done top-down

Réseaux sociaux et amitiés

2007-10-30T06:46:00.000Z

Comme à peu près tout le monde, je suis assez impressionné par la vitesse de développement de Facebook et la pertinence de l'ouverture de leur code.

Je trouve leur style éditorial encore à revoir. "Jean and Claude are now friends" - vous avez du voir ce message des dizaines de fois. L'analogie avec les réseaux NON sociaux est amusante. Prenez le TGV ou les autoroutes par exemple : "avec l'ouverture de la ligne Paris - Strasbourg on va enfin pouvoir passer un week-end à Strasbourg". En d'autres termes, on va enfin pouvoir aller à Strabourg.

Faux.

On pouvait de tout temps aller à Strasbourg. D'ailleurs, lorsque ni les autoroutes ni le TGV n'étaient disponibles, c'est le voyage lui-même qui était d'une autre nature. En étant un brin excessifs, on pourrait dire que le TGV et l'autouroute ne permettent pas de voyager, ils suppriment l'espace. Et donc une possibilité d'apprendre, de comprendre, de faire une transition entre deux régions, entre deux géographies. Ce qui n'est pas un jugement de valeur, juste un constat. Il y a toujours d'autres moyens pour rattraper le temps perdu lorsque l'on arrive a Strasbourg et essayer de comprendre, de s'adapter.

"Jean et Paul are now friends" est un peu excessif. Je me demande ce que supprime cette accélération de la vitesse de la "mise en relation".

Web 2.0 talent management or talent management with new tools ?

2007-10-19T23:10:00.000+01:00

I had a great lunch with Pierre a few days ago, and we obviously talked about Taleo Performance. I have seen some screen shots, and the stuff is really interesting. Obviously, the interface is very much web 2.0 (the tag cloud for network management is particularly interesting) but others like Workstream seem to be following the same lead.

Including personnal network development and involvment in the anual review is really a best practice. I would say it is an opening for what is next in talent management.

For what I have not yet seen, and that I am finding necessary at some clients, is collaboration management. That is to say, not to use web 2.0 tools to enhance the annual review process and enhance the network of people involved in talent management, but to include adoption and usage of the new web 2.0 collaborative tools by a team or community as an indicator of their performance of team work capability.

We should be giving teams responsibility for talent development and assessment very soon. And I have a feeling that Taleo Performance data model is almost ready for that coming customization era.

Human capital and accounting, or how to learn foreign languages

2007-10-15T22:14:00.000+01:00

On October 11th, there was a passionate discussion about investment decisions regarding human capital at AFPLANE, in Paris. HR directors from major French Groups, Partners from venture capital firms and from accounting firms argued about the best way to take into account human capital in investment decisions.

As a participant, I must say I had the feeling that no one really wanted to go deep inside the issue. As one partner from an accounting firm put it, "we have been asked to look for new methods to account for human capital for years and I must say I have given up looking". Basically, HR investments are expensed and capital investments are capitalized.

I was having a conversation with a good friend from Scientipole Initiative after the show. We argued that human capital issues were new to our accounting friends. And he told me that "some languages are just not ready to describe certain facts". He related a story from three points of view : entrepreneur, finance, accounting. Very interesting.

So yes, accounting is not ready to account for human capital, or at least I have not yet heard of an ambitious initiative. Is it the accounting cycle (year) that is not adapted to an accelerated economy ? In this case, it would be the balance sheet view that should change ... Is it actually the "industrial-age" vision of the economy that still drives accounting specialists ? Or is it just that we HR have not taken the matter seriously enough ?

Probably the latter. But the point is, when we invest some million euros in our key people development, interesting things tend to happen : new privileged relationships, new R&D projects, and new skills for these key people that they will some day negociate on the market.

That, to my mind, means that some value has been created, for the company and for the individual talents. We have to learn to identify the assets behind that value (and that should help close the growing gap between book value and market value of our companies).

Le facteur humain dans les décisions d'investissement

2007-10-02T16:52:00.000+01:00

Parmi les sujets brulants dans le monde du talent, aucun ne suscite autant de contreverses que celui des indicateurs, des métriques, de la vision financière du talent ou du capital humain.

L'AFPLANE organise une soirée débat sur ce sujet le 11 octobre prochain. Grand intérêt de cette soirée, celle de permettre la confrontation des points de vue des trois catégories concernées au premier chef par ce sujet:

Les managers ou dirigeants de la fonction RH
Les investisseurs
Les experts financiers et comptables.

Nous espérons pouvoir faire avancer tant soit peu le débat, d'autant plus que sont représentés à la table ronde des profils très divers (investisseurs en capital et aide à la création d'entreprise, direction générale, direction des ressources humaines, experts comptable et financier).

Pourrions-nous espérer voir un jour au bilan de nos entreprises une trace de ses investissements dans le développement des collaborateurs ?
Ce serait peut-être le lien manquant entre le talent et les autres actifs immatériels ...

Why C-level HR must drive organization

2007-09-19T14:18:00.000+01:00

I was yesterday at the HR Congress in Paris, giving a speech and assisting to other events. As usual, new ideas where all around (social networks in particular).

But what really struck me was the number of questions people would ask speakers about "how can we do that in my particular type of organization ?" (regarding talent management processes, social networks, new generation recruitment, ...).

And I was also struck by the answers given, that often hung around how "change management initiative" would achieve the miracle.

To my mind, the short answer is different. There is such a thing as a well-designed and an ill-designed organization. And HR processes cannot be expected to be successful within ill-designed organizations. Yes, a talent review is difficult in a silo-based organization in which there is no internal mobility; yes, social networks cannot be easily implemented in an organization where self-expression is restricted.

And yet, more and more, we know that successful talent management is the basis for corporate success.

As I said, in this post title : C-level HR must now win the battle for corporate organization leadership. And make sure that the organization is designed to allow for talent management.

Explosion des réseaux et défis RH

2007-08-30T17:54:00.000+01:00

J'ai recemment suivi un lien conseillé par Olivier Amprimo de Headshift sur quelques nouveaux acteurs dans le people search. Il est maintenant un peu banal de dire que la gestion de son propre profil sur le web est un élément clé de la navigation professionnelle. Je crois que chacun l'a compris et dans quelques mois ces recherches devraient permettre aux professionnels de faire leurs dossiers de candidats directement sur le web ...

On parle moins cependant du bouleversement que la structuration des réseaux sociaux va provoquer pour les Directions des Ressources Humaines : à travers leurs collaborateurs, la qualité de leurs processus de développement du talent est désormais visible pour tous (ce n'était le cas hier que pour les professionnels). Qu'est-ce que ceci signifie ?

D'abord, que si vos collaborateurs sont perçus comme "moins performants" que la moyenne sur une fonction donnée, il sera plus difficile (et donc plus cher) de recruter en général;
Ensuite, que si ces collaborateurs ne sont pas très présents sur les réseaux sociaux, les GenY (qui eux, y passent une grande partie de leur temps) ne voudront sans doute même pas postuler (voir d'ailleurs les initiatives de certaines grandes entreprises qui ont fait beaucoup de bruit).

La gestion des réseaux sociaux (la mise en place de réseaux internes et le management de vos collaborateurs dans ce domaine, leurs networking skills et leur présence online) est un défi supplémentaire pour la DRH en cette rentrée. Et il est clé de savoir intégrer cette dimension sociale avec les processus de gestion du talent.

Pour les entreprises dont les processus de gestion sont performants, l'intégration de la dimension sociale ne doit pas se limiter à la mise à disposition d'outils. Cette intégration doit partir d'une réflexion sur l'impact que la structuration de réseaux sociaux aura sur le profil de vos employés.

Pour les entreprises dont les processus de gestion sont en pleine transformation, je crois que c'est une magnifique opportunité d'intégrer la dimension sociale à la source

RH 2.0 : la RH au centre de l'entreprise

2007-07-11T17:24:00.000+01:00

J'ai participé recemment à une conversation qui constatait que la RH "n'est toujours pas stratégique". Une demi-journée à la Journée Nationale des Actifs Immatériels a terminé de me convaincre que tout converge pour que ceci change définitivement: le DRH est aujourd'hui naturellement au centre de l'entreprise et il a les outils, et sans doute le support, pour faire de la RH une fonction stratégique. Ce que font d'ailleurs certains de mes clients et d'autres DRH.

Naturellement au centre de l'entreprise. Sur son site, l'Observatoire de l'Immatériel fait remarquer que, en tant que responsable du capital humain, le DRH est "à la tête de l’actif qui régénère tous les autres et qui est donc le premier actif de l’entreprise".

En effet, si l'on regarde les catégories d'actifs immatériels qui ont été définis par l'Observatoire de l'Immatériel on est tenté de les rapprocher de véritables compétences collectives ou organisationnelles. Je donne quelques exemples :
- Capital Humain, que je rapproche de la capacité à attirer, développer et mobiliser des collaborateurs;
- Capital Client, que je rapproche de la compétence commerciale de l'entreprise;
- Capital Marques, que je rapproche de la légitimité de l'entreprise dans son domaine d'activité, et donc sa capacité à convaincre;
- Capital Organisation, que je rapproche de la capacité de l'entreprise à s'adapter continuellement pour survivre.

Ce ne sont plus seulement les collaborateurs, que le DRH a pour responsabilité de développer, mais aussi l'intelligence collective de l'entreprise.

Les outils. Or, aujourd'hui, les outils nécessaires pour construire, dynamiser, piloter ces compétences collectives sont véritablement en place, ainsi que, plus important, l'état d'esprit qui permettra de le faire. Je parle des outils qui ont été regroupés dans ce que l'on appelle Entreprise 2.0: quelques définitions, Andrew McAffee, Philip Lay, ce très bon billet de Bertrand Duperrin.

L'état d'esprit. Enfin, en ces temps de rareté du capital humain, de marché de l'emploi tendu, il faut prêter particulièrement attention aux générations qui arrivent sur le marché du travail : elles ont été élevées dans le culte des clans, des réseaux (du téléphone portable aux jeux massivement multi-joueur). Elles ont nativement la compréhension de l'avantage de l'ouverture, de la co-création, du partage de la valeur, des fondements de l'économie web, loin de l'esprit plus individualiste et compétitif de nos élites traditionnelles.

Ce qui m'amène à ma propre définition de RH 2.0 : la fonction responsable du développement et de la mobilisation du capital humain des collaborateurs et de l'intelligence collective dans une organisation.

Métriques du capital humain

2007-06-25T22:08:00.000+01:00

Pour ceux d'entre vous qui recoivent la revue RH&M, le numéro de juin contient un article sur les métriques du capital humain que j'ai écrit avec Philippe Masson.

Au-delà de l'article, dont vous trouverez un court résumé sur le site de l'AFPLANE, nous voulons pousser la réflexion sur la nécessité de mesurer l'investissement dans le développement des collaborateurs des entreprises, ainsi que les résultats de cet investissement. Nous sommes persuadés que c'est la prochaine étape à franchir dans la montée de la fonction RH ves la prise de décision stratégique.

La prise en compte de la création de valeur liée au capital humain dans l'évaluation des entreprises rentre dans le périmètre aujourd'hui de plus en plus important de la valorisation des actifs immatériels.

Cette réflexion va être approfondie lors d'une soirée AFPLANE et RH&M, organisée le 10 octobre 2007.

Je donnerai des nouvelles de cette soirée ici.

Is HR strategic ?

2007-06-21T22:39:00.000+01:00

Thomas Otter has launched a conversation on a subject that doesn't seem to evolve easily. No, HR is not strategic, even though Talent Management is a key strategic issue for any company today.

A few people have already acted on this proposal, as you will see on Thomas post.

My own position is as follows:

1 - For Talent Management to be a successful process within a corporation, we do not need HR anymore. Most managers already have talent management skills, and vendors all around are eager to help with annual reviews, succession planning or HR metrics;

2 - Now, if Talent Management is to become a key strategic issue, appart from a successful process, it needs a strong professional sponsor. I have read many posts about the new HR competencies (here is one) and I agree that HR skills have to evolve.

3 - But what really needs to be thought over carefully is the strategic nature of talent management. You need to design the metrics that will show the links between talent management and key assets of the corporation, as well as those between talent management and the bottom line.

This last point is the most difficult one. We still live in an "industrial accounting" environment, even though this is slowly evolving to take into account "tought to trade assets". You need to be able to say what kind of assets and what kind of profits you are going to generate when you speak about beefing up your corporate university or financing a new community of practice.

At Afplane, we have been working on that subject and plan to continue. Our idea is to find the steps that will take us to the next Talent Economy.

If HR is ever to be strategic it has to herald this movement. Human Capital valuation is HR next frontier.

Le recrutement en start-up ... ou ce qui nous attend

2007-06-21T21:51:00.000+01:00

Voici une bonne réflexion sur ce qu'est le recrutement en start-up ou jeune entreprise innovante.

On pourrait se dire : c'est bien pour les start-up, mais nous recherchons des personnes plus classiques dans nos entreprises ? Drive, curiosity, ethics ? Si on pousse la réflexion, ça ne fait pas que des personnes faciles à manager ...

Intéressant de faire le lien avec ce post de Fast Company.

Il se trouve que, de plus en plus, les profils qui feront le succès des entreprises ne sont pas ceux que celles-ci ont appris à manager. C'est pourquoi le processus d'intégration doit dès maintenant évoluer pour devenir un véritable sas d'échange entre les pratiques de management, d'un côté, et les aptitudes, attentes, compétences, comportements des futurs employés de l'autre. Ce que ceux-ci apportent à l'entreprise est essentiel, et l'entreprise doit apprendre à s'adapter à ses nouveaux talents.

Avenir : le recrutement comme stratégie de croissance et d'innovation.

Campeones ! A post for soccer /talent fans

2007-06-17T23:23:00.000+01:00

The Real Madrid just won another national title and fans went on to a huge party at Cibeles.

This is in fact a great talent management case.

A few years ago, a spanish businessman, Florentino Perez transformed the club financials and marketing, by powering and expanding the brand and using the real estate assets of the club. It has become a well known case among sports business cases

He also decided the best players in the world should play at Real Madrid (Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo, ...). And he actually hired them.

After a huge initial success, the club lost its nerve. No titles, no game, four years on.

And this year, instead of hiring huge stars, the club brought in "solid citizens", players that held their ground and did their job. The club also brought in an Italian trainer who had already once rescued the club. And fired Ronaldo.

And at year end, without playing "jogo bonito" or delighting the fans, the club is champion. This happened :
- Stars were treated as other players ; and delivered;
- Old values (fighting spirit) was brought back by the trainer (who actually threatened to fire David Beckham, thus igniting the players spirit);
- Game was managed by the technical team - no presidential wishes were ever considered.

What could this tell us about Talent Management ?
- Talent Management serves a business culture. In this case, a Spanish club who valued fighting spirit above all. If you forget the objective of your Talent Management processes, no matter how big the stars you bring in, you won't reach your objectives; and your clients (the fans) won't forgive you;
- Stars are made, more rarely bought. Read these articles from HBS. What I mean is : if you treat stars differently because they are stars, you are not managing talent for your business, you are managing stars. And developing a star's human capital is not equivalent to developing an organization collective intelligence; the stars get the benefit in the end, not the organization. A win-win situation should always be preferred

There are other interesting point to make about soccer and sports in general (for instance, how to value human capital); I'll be writing about those soon.

Quels sont les services 2.0 que vous avez utilisé aujourd’hui ?

2007-06-15T22:00:00.000+01:00

Je réagis à une proposition intéressante de Jacques ce qui me permet de m'interroger sur l'impact que ces outils ont eu sur ma façon de travailler et communiquer. Voici ma liste

iGoogle comme page d'accueil
Gmail
Google Blocnotes pour réfléchir sur internet
del.icio.us pour mes bookmarks de travail
Google Calendar comme agenda partagé au boulot et en famille !
Blogger pour partager mes idées sur le talent
Feed Burner pour organiser mes feeds
Google Analytics pour le suivi
Ourstory pour les albums de famille et amis
Linkedin pour étendre mon réseau professionnel
Skipe pour parler !
MyBlogLog que je viens de rajouter

Superbe initiative pour trouver des services et se poser quelques questions

Je transmet l'info à Dominique, Martin et Pierre, que le sujet devrait intéresser.

Avons-nous les talents pour nous imposer dans l'univers 2.0 ?

2007-06-12T22:14:00.000+01:00

Un article intéressant sur l'adoption de la culture communautaire en France, souligne les blocages à cette adoption au sein des entreprises, un blocage qu'Olivier place au top des hiérarchies.

Intéressant dans ce contexte de lire ce qu'Andrew McAffee a à dire sur le sujet de l'adoption de l'entreprise 2.0. Lorsque l'on lit :

... to illustrate how technologists have done a brilliant job at three tasks: building platforms to let lots of users express themselves, letting the structure of these platforms emerge over time instead of imposing it up front, and helping users deal with the resulting flood of content."

on se dit qu'on est encore loin, en France, du moment où l'entreprise sera co-produite par les salariés ! Et je suis d'accord que trop de temps passé "sur internet" est rarement bien perçu.

Raisons d'espérer ? Bien sûr, deux majeures à mon sens:
1 - les générations qui arrivent sur le marché de l'emploi travailent nativement en mode communautaire ou tribal. Les entreprises, plus ou moins rapidement, vont comprendre la valeur ajoutée qu'il y a à les laisser travailler sous ce mode natif;
2- le contexte politique pourrait accélérer le développement des TPE et PME (de la start-up à la pme régionale), qui deviendraient alors des compétiteurs acharnés pour les meilleurs talents. Les grands groupes seront forcés d'accélérer leur transformation et d'adopter ces modes natifs dont je parlais

Cela pose un nouveau défi à l'attraction et au recrutement. Car il ne s'agit plus de recruter et d'intégrer de nouveaux talents, mais bien de recruter ces talents et de faire en sorte qu'ils aient sur l'entreprise un véritable impact : qu'ils s'intègrent, mais que l'entreprise intègre aussi ce qu'ils apportent de nouveau.

Un changement copernicien pour le recrutement, qui pourrait d'ailleurs s'inspirer des meilleurs pratiques de chasse de tête

Une équipe talentueuse

2007-05-18T21:37:00.000+01:00

Ca y est, on connaît les noms ! Le nouveau gouvernement est en place

Je ne peux attendre de voir le fonctionnement de Rachida, Valérie, Michelle, Christine & Christine et les autres et l'impact salutaire que ça va avoir sur feu la langue de bois politique.

Ca risque fort d'accélérer l'avènement d'une vraie diversité dans les board-rooms et autre comex en France !

Qui avait dit que le secteur public était en retard en termes de management ?

Le capital humain, V2, où comment dépasser la RTT

2007-05-15T21:53:00.000+01:00

Cela fait deux ans que je travaille avec mon petit groupe de l'AFPLANE sur la notion de capital humain. Les conclusions sont aujourd'hui claires:

- on ne parle de capital humain qu'à propos des individus. Ce n'est cependant qu'une notion, et la meilleure façon de l'approcher c'est de regarder la valeur d'un individu sur le marché du travail;

- dans le monde de l'entreprise, le capital humain n'a pas d'existence comptable. Il n'existe donc pas à proprement parler;

- ce qui existe dans l'entreprise c'est une véritable intelligence collective, créée par des individus, et qui les dépasse.

L'intelligence collective est à l'entreprise ce que le capital humain est à l'individu.

En s'insérant dans une entreprise, chacun profite de son intelligence collective pour réaliser son travail mais aussi pour se développer individuellement.

Avec ces présupposés, il devient urgent d'enrichir la mesure du travail pour dépasser la simple mesure horaire. Car il semble clair que 35 heures passés dans deux entreprises différentes n'auront pas le même résultat, ni pour l'entreprise, ni pour le salarié.

A une époque où l'inactivité est aussi nocive que l'exploitation, où le chômage est aussi tragique que la misère, il devient urgent d'adapter la façon dont le travail et ses résultats sont mesurés.

Return on talent

2007-04-26T22:51:00.000+01:00

Lowell Bryan has argued here that companies should concentrate on return on talent (profit per employee) and use return on capital as a sanity check. It is good to see we are getting there !

I think Lowell Bryan is right to concentrate on financials, as they drive decisions in most cases. And I am more than happy to see efforts in the direction of making talent the driver of wealth creation. I am just worried about the implications of concentrating on profit per employee. You will not get a higher profit per employee only by shedding "C-workers" (even if this mechanically does the job). Employees are not just employees, they form the social body of a corporation and as such it is difficult to account for them on an individual basis, without taking into account interactions.

An employee with a low "profit ratio" can be a relationships nexus allowing other coworkers to accelerate their own performance.

We need a new mindset to really approach talent financials, probably the one that goes with the "networked economy".

And we definitely need to think about the relation between talent and the assets they create for a company.

Are French politics an example of mass collaboration ?

2007-04-24T22:49:00.000+01:00

Rather interestingly, Segolène Royal launched a massive "collective" writing of her "Pacte Presidentiel". This was built around a website, "Desirs d'Avenir", in which I have seen interesting and high quality discussions and "wikis". This was complemented by real life meetings all around France. Both streams of events resulted in a small team analyzing and trying to reach conclusions to actually write the candidate's "Pacte Présidentiel".

As someone that has been trying to help organizations develop internal network and communities, I was not optimistic about the impact of this methodology. So ambitious ! It seemed too quick to work and producing a real document felt to me like manipulating people.

And yet, the candidate made it to the next round. As always, it is not so much the contents as the social network created around a person, an idea or a group that is important. Even in politics.

If she goes all the way to the presidency, how will she continue with her "community-oriented" policy-making ? Will she push it and break barriers in this brave new world or fall back and risk being seen as only another talented politician ?

In any case, we have not heard the last of "mass policy making"