CommLog

The State of the Blogosphere

Technorati's David Sifry has released his latest quarterly State of the Blogosphere report. Take note senior executives and communication leads everywhere: The blogosphere continues to double every 5 1/2 months. Technorati is now tracking 27.5 million blogs and counting. David's summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs [Note: 300,000 new blogs since he compiled his report)
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Are Your Stars Aligned?

If you’re thinking about re-designing your organization—remember, it’s all about aligning with your strategy. Strategy—which includes vision, mission and goals—should be the foundation for building your organization, and it should be front and center every time you make a decision about your organization.

Need to decide what your structure and reporting lines should look like? Revising your reward system? Considering how to attract, retain and develop the right people? Trying to foster better collaboration and networking across groups? If you’re tackling any of these challenging issues, you should refer to your strategy as a guidepost for making organizational design decisions.

Jay Galbraith created the star model as a framework for thinking holistically about the major components of organizational design. It’s a great visual and helpful reminder about how all of the pieces of your organization fit together.

An excellent resource on organizational design is Designing Dynamic Organizations by Galbraith, Downey and Kates; it’s user-friendly, a comfortable read and provides a place to dig into details on the star model.

Download Star.doc

A Few Thoughts About Learning

While doing a little light reading on systems thinking, I came across a quote I really like—“ Nothing inhibits future success like making procedures to formalize what generated a previous success.”

In The Art of Systems Thinking, O’Connor and McDermott remind us that what we often hail as a success was really a break-through—a new way of thinking—which comes from a change in one of our mental models. Once a break-through is formalized and institutionalized it becomes the norm—and we tend not to question it or give it any further thought. This is especially true when our organizations select people who act and think like the existing team. No one questions the norms. The risk? Nothing changes and over time the system runs down.

So, what can we do to avoid organizational decay? O’Connor and McDermott offer thoughts on two types of learning—simple learning and generative learning. Simple learning takes place when we change what we do in response to the results and feedback we get—for example, making changes to your operations based on the results of a satisfaction survey completed by your customers. It’s important to do this—and it’s a good way to get better and/or more efficient at what you already do.

However, if you’re really looking for the change, revitalization, and innovations needed to stave off decay, you need to foster generative learning. Generative learning happens when we let feedback change our mental models—that is, change our deeply rooted assumptions and our way of looking at things—an essential if you need to solve big problems and drive your business toward a changing future.

(Source: The Art of Systems Thinking, Joseph O’Connor & Ian McDermott)

Intranet Trends

CIO columnist Shiv Singh outlines seven Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006.

Some excerpts:

1. The Intranet grows up and makes new friends
   

   For example, corporate e-mail, telephony, mobile warrior applications, virtual team rooms, executive dashboards and enterprise intranets are distinct tools with independent owners, budgets and business cases behind them today. However, in the not too distant future, you’ll have a single, integrated voice and data interface that will combine these tools in a dynamic, natural and adaptive manner. IDC calls this coming consolidation the Enterprise Workplace while Forrester refers to it as the information workplace. Irrespective of what you may call it, expect the trend to hit you in the next two to three years.

2. Intranet ROI will be pushed to the back burner
   When was the last time your management team asked you to create an ROI model for corporate e-mail? It was probably quite some time ago. In contrast to e-mail, intranet managers have often been asked to justify investments in their company intranet. Well, there’s good news. In the future, senior executives will be less concerned about the tangible ROI of an intranet. It will be an assumed cost of doing business, just as corporate e-mail has become.
3. Expect Intranets to become even more pervasive
   

   Expect to see many more dynamic, innovative intranets in the near future, whether they’re servicing the board members of a Fortune 500 company or farmers in a developing country. Also, expect to be challenged to deliver more dynamic and innovative intranet solutions for your employees and business partners.

4. The user experience matters at last
   

   IDC explains this trend as a new “user experience platform” that is emerging to improve the lives of information workers integrating existing intranets and transactional applications. And as an intranet manager, this is good. A few years ago, employees barely cared about their company intranets. Today, they’re using their intranets so much that they expect them to have the simplicity and usability of Google or Yahoo! Furthermore, in many large companies, the intranet serves as the official face of the company. Companies with unusable and complex intranets are doing a huge disservice to their employees.

5. The Ajax revolution hits the intranet
   

   Now imagine a physical map of your office on your intranet. But also imagine that you could scroll around it, click on a graphic of a desk and get a person’s name, designation and contact information right away. And imagine if by clicking on his or her name, you got a listing of all the recent e-mails sent to you by that person. Or imagine an application on your intranet that has built-in calculators that let you quickly calculate your ideal monthly 401k contributions and depict the results in a graph without requiring several pages to load. And imagine if the graph could be manipulated in real time. That’s the power of Ajax.

6. Blogs come and go but RSS will remain
   

   The related technology to continue to keep an eye on is Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Companies that embrace RSS as a content format and use it to publish information to employees will have far greater success than with blogging alone. Enabling employees to subscribe to subject and department specific RSS feeds and then view them via readers will enable more targeted, community focused conversations in the workplace. And the ease with which postings can be viewed in an RSS reader will encourage more employees to participate. For RSS to be adopted however, companies will have to let their employees subscribe to both internal and external RSS feeds. If this happens, then I believe that in some companies blogging combined with wide adoption of RSS readers will become even more relevant than the company intranet.

7. Wikis gain prominence and get integrated
   

   In a similar fashion to blogs, wikis do have a role in the workplace but only if they’re used for the right purpose and if they have the right culture to flourish in. Many smaller, less structured companies have embraced wikis as their intranet technology platform. For these organizations with flatter, less formal hierarchies, the self correcting mechanisms of a wiki create the right balance of empowering the employees to share and preventing things from spinning out of control. After all, each time a contributor edits or adds to a page, his or her name appears in the revisions list.

CAUTION: Benchmarking Ahead

“Benchmarking” is being used widely across businesses today. And if companies aren’t using it, they want to be, or perhaps, feel they ought to be. But do you have appropriate standards in place to implement benchmarking? Let’s say you conduct a “benchmarking survey” to compare the “numbers” in your company to the “numbers” of other companies. You find your company has more favorable numbers in all areas but one. Sounds good, right? So you report these findings back to management. Sighs of relief that “everything is just fine” may give leadership that warm, fuzzy feeling, while in reality these findings mean little more than you’re the best of a mediocre group. If mediocrity is in fact what you are striving for, congratulations, you’ve achieved it. Is this what you’re trying to accomplish?

If your answer is no, and your benchmarking agenda entails discovering and incorporating best practices, you may want to dig a little deeper. Benchmarking should not be a comparison check. Benchmarking should be used as an improvement process. You should be searching for best practices, what the standards are, and who sets them. But you should also be interested in how those people meet the standards and why those practices are “best.”

Remember to think before you leap. Here’s a link that may help to guide you along your benchmarking way.   

Ten Benchmarking Mistakes to Avoid

Tivo Alert: Executive Suite

This Saturday at midnight (and on a couple of other occasions in the coming weeks), Turner Classic Movies is showing Executive Suite--an Academy Award-nominated film from 1954 that is, unfortunately, not yet available on DVD. Directed by John Houseman and starring luminaries such William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, June Allyson, Walter Pidgeon, and Shelley Winters, the film represents one of Hollywood's first studies of corporate culture.

I happened on the film when my Tivo recommended it several months ago. What I found unsettling, but not surprising, was the film's all-white cast and relegation of all of the women in the film to "stand-behind-your-man" roles. In this respect, it provides a benchmark against which to compare what has changed in 50 years.

But what surprised me were elements I did not expect to see in a film portraying corporate culture half a century ago. Poor succession planning launches the plot. A secondary plot revolves around insider trading. And a major character--notably, the antagonist--is a practitioner of crisis communication planning and Lean Six Sigma. No one in the film actually utters any of the terms I've italicized in the three previous sentences. But their presence suggested to me that while the players and lexicon in corporate culture may have changed significantly in 50 years, the underlying archetypes may not have changed as much as I used to think. 

The Wisdom of Dumb Questions

Is there really such thing as a dumb question? Sure, according to Fortune magazine, when used wisely"dumb questions" have potential to get to the heart of the matter.

...a powerful insight into business success, one that applies to every industry on every continent in every era: Dumb questions lead to smart decisions.

iStockphoto

A great source of cheap, hi-resolution, royalty-free presentation graphics: iStockphoto.com. Great images for just a buck or two a piece. Replace your clipart with these kinds of images and do yourself (and your audience) a favor ...

Life Hacks

According to The Guardian, our friend David Allen and his Getting Things Done philosophy have achieved cult status. In particular...

Web and IT professionals have taken Allen's core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called "life hacks". Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com - all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system. "As lovers of systems and frameworks, geeks take to GTD easily," says Merlin Mann, a writer from San Francisco who runs 43Folders.com. "They hate boredom so they are often jumping around, multitasking and trying to keep a dozen balls in the air." "Life hacks are really a superset of GTD - basically any kind of trick you can devise that makes it hard to screw up," says Mann.

Among the examples of life hacks the article describes is this gem: "Want to keeping meetings short and on topic? Write an agenda and make sure everyone drinks a litre of water at the beginning." Read the whole thing.

Live this Quote

In our leadership coaching practice one of the things we tell our clients is that while it's okay (and usually even smart) to be skeptical about results, always be optimistic about people. A quote was recently passed on to me by a client that emobdies this principle and represents a philosophy to live by when growing your talent: "Always stick with the optimists...it's going to be tough enough even if they're right." --James Reston, former writer for the NY Times

You're not alone.

Hot off of PR Newswire...Management Failing to Connect With Employees at Almost Half of Companies, Says Survey

According to the report, Best Practices in Employee Communication: A Study of Global Challenges and Approaches, 48 percent of 472 organizations surveyed worldwide said their management has not effectively communicated their business strategies to employees and engaged them in living it in their daily jobs. As a result, only about one-third -- 37 percent -- of organizations reported that their employees are effectively aligned to the missions and visions of their businesses.

You know what? I think 48 percent seems high.

The Lombardi Rules

On a recent stroll through Barnes and Noble, I picked up The Lombardi Rules: 26 lessons from Vince Lombardi, the Greatest Coach for what I thought would be a recreational read. I find Lombardi�s quotes and wisdom smart and inspiring. The new book by Vince Lombardi Jr. uses his father�s quotes to reinforce that leaders, in both athletics and business, are made, not born. The book is less of a glance into what Lombardi achieved, but more how he achieved it through his leadership.

I would say that the quality of each individual�s life is the full measure of that individual�s commitment to excellence and to victory�whether it be football, whether it be business, whether it be politics or government.�Vince Lombardi

At first glance, Lombardi�s 26 lessons seem ordinary, but they�re told in a succinct, relatable way and capped with one of his uniquely wise quotes (I've posted the lessons in the expanded entry). The 26 chapters are short, relatable and real. It�s a simple read (one of Lombardi�s fundamentals in itself) and can likely be finished over lunch hour�and if you read it over lunch you�ll come back feeling like you just had the best half-time locker room talk of the year.

Heh

A client forwarded this the other day ...

Dubious Achievements in Employee Communication

July's "award" goes to Irish airline Aer Lingus, which produced a "discussion document," leaked to employees, that enumerated a variety of "environmental push factors" the organization could use to encourage employees to volunteer to take a package to leave the organization. According to the BBC, these "push factors"...

...included suggestions that cabin crew swap their current uniforms for jump suits and t-shirts, while pilots should be forced to attend long, tedious training courses."

I suspect that this leaked memo in its own right has served (intentionally or unintentionally) as an effective "environmental push factor."

Hyatt On PowerPoint

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, offers his five rules for better PowerPoint. All good advice. We'd also direct him (and you) to our principles of PowerPoint, and many of the .PPT-related posts that have graced this page over the past few years.

History Lessons from Fred Smith

As I skimmed through the USA Today I found sitting outside my door this morning, I came across an interview with FedEx CEO Fred Smith. The story of FedEx and Fred Smith has always intrigued me, so I checked it out. They focused most of the interview on Fred's love of history and his view that you can learn more about leadership and business from history than from many popular leadership books. One of the leaders I admire most gave me the same advice a few years ago, so I thought I'd pass along Fred's other tips:

Tips steeped in history from Fred Smith * There are only about six business books worth reading. For enduring lessons, read history. * The great conquerors of the past treated the conquered well. Remember that next time your company makes an acquisition. * The most risky course is often inaction. * When things go wrong, take responsibility.

The Value Of Values

Strategy + Business (the business magazine / PR tool of Booz Allen Hamilton) has an article up on "the value of corporate values." It's the reusult of a moderately robust research effort (300+ completed surveys but only 20 interviews) about "how companies are dealing with the challenges of managing values." (Link here; PDF file here; free registration required.) The findings are what you'd expect: lots of firms state similar values ("integrity," "commitment to customers," "commitment to employees"); the rub is in living them. Of course, we believe there's another rub as well: not confusing value messages with strategy messages. At CRA, we encourage clients to communicate values as "how we play" or "how we work" and strategy as "how we're going to succeed" or, if there's a vision for the company, "how we're going to get there." The challenge with values is that they're not terribly actionable from a planning perspective. As a mid-level manager it's hard to look at the next 12 months and plot (or articulate) how my team is going to "do" diversity or "do" integrity. A strategy message fills that gap: If you tell me our strategy is to "improve customer service, improve reliability, and manage costs" ... those are things I can take action on, whatever my level. I can then invoke values by saying: "And as you do so, act with integrity and encourage diversity." Mission, vision, values, and strategy each have a linked but distinct space in the strategic message heirarchy. Strategy is the game plan; values are how we play the game.

Maintaining Employee Trust

Working Knowledge has a nice short piece from Stever Robbins on maintaining and rebuilding employee trust. A few highlights:

* One powerful way to sustain trust is to put the interests of others ahead of your own. Putting others first means knowing their goals and concerns, and helping them. Is a colleague a passionate baseball fan? Give them your Red Sox tickets some afternoon, for no reason at all. Is that the game where the Red Sox win the World Series? Even better! You'll suffer real pain at giving up your tickets. Public sacrifice, if it's real and visible, builds huge credibility when it's in the service of others. And the sacrifice must be real. Reducing your bonus from $2 million to $1.75 million just doesn't count. * If you get a reputation for taking advantage of others, however, even people whom you have treated well can start to doubt. One CEO wrote articles trumpeting his ethical behavior. Employees knew otherwise; they'd seen him cheat distributors and shirk on his commitments to his partners. So the more the CEO crowed, the more the grapevine passed anonymous notes highlighting his lies. * In business, one bad manager rarely destroys trust in the entire company. But several bad managers, armed with policies that clearly treat people as disposable implements, can destroy trust in an entire organization. At that point, bringing in a new management team that takes clear, visible action might have a chance of rebuilding trust. These actions will be hampered because employees have learned to distrust the organization as a whole. But at least the new leaders will have a chance to gain one-on-one trust and translate that into the organizational changes needed to build trust throughout.

Read the whole thing.

Go See Fast Company Now

Several things worth noting over at Fast Company�s blog, FC Now, today. The first is the blog itself: It�s a nice example of a single blog authored by multiple folks with similar but varying content expertise. It also reflects sound blog practice (first person voice, brief and pithy entries, links, un-spun and candid information � see Jeff Jarvis� excellent take on blog ethics here). Most interesting, however, is how the blog -- which uses Movable Type�s standard software (as does CommLog) -- incorporates so well into the rest of FC�s site and web branding. We�re often trying to convince IT and Corp. Comm. folks that they don�t have to use a $400,000 piece of content management software for blogging functionality � that the standard (and dirt cheap) software that�s out there easily allows for incorporation into nearly any existing site or page. FC�s blog is a great example.

It's Not Just About Readership

Steve Crescenzo wants to slaughter the "fun page". And in his sentiment, he's right. Of course, making the "strategic direction" page the fun page ... there's the rub.

Welch On "How To Be A Good Leader"

My colleague Robin passed this Jack Welch-authored Newsweek article around the other week. In it Welch summarizes his eight "rules" of leadership, and it's worth reading. My favorite line from the article isn't actually one of his rules:

Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

It seems I express the same sentiment most often to folks entering the GM / Managing Director ranks for the first time. It�s a big shift to make, from superstar to the creator of superstars, but it's absolutely one of the things that separates admired leaders from the rest of the crowd.

Track The Buzz @ Vault.com

We regularly keep an eye on Internet message boards for information about our clients of which they should be aware. Here's one such site you might want to add to your list of regular web reads: Vault.com. Much of the site is subcription-only, but recent messages and other features are rich enough that it's worth a regular visit.

"Write two blog entries and call me in the morning"

High Point Regional Health System recently began to prescribe weblogs for post-treatment therapy.

The research suggests that by expressing their emotions through writing, patients help to reduce anxiety and other ailments, said Anthony Newkirk, a licensed professional counselor in the hospital's behavioral health department. "It allows patients who are going through a medical situation or crisis to put things into perspective," he said. "We get more and more truthful through writing and we gain insight into who we are and our situations."

The Marketing Department hopes that it will draw attention to their website. For more information, check out the article from the Greensboro News. You can view the blogs here...

Things To See

A couple of things today worth seeing. The first is this Fast Company article on change. I was picking through FC in the concierge lounge of the hotel tonight when I came across this attention-getting intro:

Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn't, your time would end soon -- a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most? Yes, you say? Try again. Yes? You're probably deluding yourself. You wouldn't change. Don't believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That's nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

It�s a great summary of the current research on change, and it also reinforces advice we give all the time: it�s more compelling to communicate about change by introducing a new metaphor than by introducing a crisis (or �burning platform�). The article discusses this under the header �Framing Change,� and it has this nice passage:

Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." Lakoff says that frames are part of the "cognitive unconscious," but the way we know what our frames are, or evoke new ones, springs from language. For example, we typically think of a company as being like an army -- everyone has a rank and a codified role in a hierarchical chain of command with orders coming down from high to low. Of course, that's only one way of organizing a group effort. If we had the frame of the company as a family or a commune, people would know very different ways of working together. The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts. "Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have -- the long-term concepts that structure how we think -- is instantiated in the synapses of the brain," Lakoff says. "Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid." Lakoff says that's one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don't understand each other because their brains are working within different frames. The frame that dominates our thinking about how work should be organized -- the military chain-of-command model -- is extremely hard to break. When new employees start at W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex fabrics, they often refuse to believe that the company doesn't have a hierarchy with job titles and bosses. It just doesn't fit their frame. They can't accept it. It usually takes at least several months for new hires to begin to understand Gore's reframed notion of the workplace, which relies on self-directed employees making their own choices about joining one another in egalitarian small teams. Getting people to exchange one frame for another is tough even when you're working one-on-one, but it's especially hard to do for large groups of people. Howard Gardner, a cognitive scientist, MacArthur Fellow "genius" award winner, and professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, has looked at what works most effectively for heads of state and corporate CEOs. "When one is addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience," he says, "the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences."

Indeed. In another corner of the Web we find MindManager, an absolutely wonderful mind-mapping tool by MindJet that I�ve been using under trial. It�s a winner, especially if you�re a visual thinker, and if you�ve not yet been party to its tools, check it out. MindManager isn�t the only thing to see here, though. I also want to point to MindJet�s corporate blog, The MindJet Blog, for two reasons. First, I think it�s a great example of a good corporate blog: first person, honest, well written, and intelligent. Second, amongst the blog�s recent posts, I found this entry on the pros and cons of using PowerPoint and 2x2 matrices. It�s a great summary of the For/Against PowerPoint arguments. A particularly nice passage:

Persuasion by the means of entertainment: James Gilmore and Joseph Pine, authors of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, would certainly back this requirement in the business world, and so would Jeremy Rifkin whose catch phrase states: �There is no business without show business.� Seth Godin, the marketing guru, put it more provocatively: �If you�re not trying to persuade, why are you here?� Fine, but what if persuasion occurs at the expense of precision and sharpness in thinking? According to Schrage, organizations such as Sun Microsystems and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces have banned PowerPoint from their meetings, assuming that the software is a �poorly tailored cognitive straitjacket� rather than a solid analytical tool.

I hadn�t heard the straitjacket line before. Of course, frequent readers of this page know our PowerPoint positions well. We�re in the �use it to do certain kinds of things� camp, and would always take passionate-person-as-message over slideware-as-message any day of the week.

The Caf� Is Open

Warren Bickford, upcoming Chairman of the IABC, has begun publishing a blog. Called the IABC Caf�, it�s subtitled �a gathering place for professional communicators,� and he�s been kind enough to include CommLog in his blogroll. While we�re not heavily involved in IBAC, many of our clients are, and the Caf� is worth checking regularly if you're "in the business."

Email Makes You Dumb

Seems a day doesn�t pass in which I don�t coach a leader to make themselves less interruptable -- to turn off the cell phone, and turn off the �auto-check� on his or her email and download messages only at times where they can process those messages. Crazy looks, I get to that advice. But we�re certain it�s good counsel, and now thanks to London�s Institute of Psychiatry, we have some data to back it up:

Scientists at London�s Institute of Psychiatry found that environments with distracting technologies lower IQ by an average of more than 10 points when compared with quiet conditions. By comparison, other research has shown that smoking marijuana causes just a 4-point drop. A 10-point reduction is similar to the impact of missing an entire night�s sleep.

The "distracting technologies" to which they refer: email and phone calls. Yes, unless it�s the only thing you�re attending to, email actually makes you dumb. David Allen chimes in:

Does it really mean we're dumber when we respond to communication? Hardly. I think it's just reflective of the almost universal problem most people have in dealing with input and interruptions - with no real personal system they can trust (which includes consistent processing behaviors, by the way), people feel compelled to engage with the input as it shows up. But because they can't really deal with it, they just add another loose bolt inside their engine.

I�ll toss a plug to David here as well: We�ve been using his GTD Outlook Add-In for some time at CRA, and it�s revolutionized how we handle our email traffic. Highly recommended.

MIT OpenCourseWare

A member of our firm, when talking about coaching very senior �C-Suite� executives often says, �If you want to coach these people, you have to be these people.� His point is that people only trust advisors whom they feel understand their perspective, and in particular, appreciate the nuances of the business challenges they face. To that point, we�re constantly coaching communication professionals and senior managers alike to develop their business acumen. The deeper your appreciation of business and strategy the closer your seat is to the table, and you have to continually sharpen your strategic business saw if you want to add value to or as a senior officer. Here�s a great resource for doing so: MIT�s OpenCourseWare, a free, open publication of MIT�s course materials. This includes the course materials of the Sloan School of Management, one of the most prestigious business schools on the planet. So, interested in sharpening up on your understanding of operations? Check out the student presentations and readings for Theory of Operations Management. Lots at Sloan on leadership and communication as well. (Hat tip to Free Enterprise Blog.)

The Independent Worker

There's an article worth reading at DV Format about how "independent workers"--contract workers empowered by technology and expertise--are changing the employer / employee relationship. A quote:

The global communication technology is radically changing the speed, direction and amount of information flow even as it alters work roles across all organizations. The new free agent worker is creating role clarity for himself and herself. They figure out the top priorities and point themselves in that direction. They don't pull back. They don't wait for someone to give them details or marching orders. They give themselves permission to attach to the job. They feel their way along to the future. They are willing to "wing it." They have reduced improvising to an art form. They accept the fact that work life is fuzzy around the edges. They are confident that organizations aren't going to look out for people's careers as they did in the past. Because of this, it's increasingly important to behave like you're in business for yourself -- you are. Today's "employees" have to build emotional muscle. As Lily Tomlin once said, "We're all in this alone."

On Balanced Scorecards

The folks at MarketingProfs have a piece up on balanced scorecards. Worth reading. For those who seek to dig a bit deeper, Wikipedia has a nice article on balanced scorecards, which includes a set of print references and resources on the web.

Another Communication Blog

One of our clients, Kelly Thul of State Farm, a strong comms professional and early adopter of blogs in the workplace, has started his own communication-related blog: Communication Economies. Check it out.

Less Is More

In the Wall Street Journal's latest "Real Time" column, Less Is More, Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry question the practice of appending a long signature to every e-mail:

We know that signatures are intended to add some personality to dry interoffice communications, but we still can't help but wince when we get a one-line e-mail -- followed by six lines of contact info and some italicized Jimmy Buffett. And while each of us is, of course, a unique and beautiful snowflake, the bottom of an e-mail may not be the best place to express ourselves. Trust us: Ending some workaday bit of bureaucracy with a call to arms by Bruce Springsteen tends to make you look like pathetic cubicle-farm veal, while ending some serious corporate inquiry with the lyrics to 'Louie, Louie' makes you look like a lightweight.

SOX check?

Spell check has become a part of our daily routine. Before an email leaves our outbox, we press the F7 key or our email program automatically checks for spelling errors when we hit send. New software was introduced this week that would perform a similar task, but instead of looking for misspelled words or grammar errors, it looks for words or phrases that signify Sarbanes Oxley violations or could open an organization up to legal action. There's an application that would check blog entries as well. For more background, check out the InfoWorld article: E-mail and blog monitors are launched.

Battle Lessons

The New Yorker's Battle Lessons examines organizational learning within the Army. Some elements are specific to the Army's culture:

For efficiency of conversation, Army officers are tough to beat. Trained to convey critical information under stress, they enunciate like radio announcers, in complete, unhesitating sentences. Moreover, they tend to be good listeners, with a refreshing ability — and willingness — to get to the nub of a difficult issue. Ask an Army officer a painful question and he or she will answer it, provided it doesn�t involve secrets, with a kind of Boy Scout candor all but unknown in, say, the corporate or political realm.

Some are more universal:

I asked Saul what lessons the Army has learned in Iraq, and he said, �Not much, because lessons learned, in past tense, means you�ve modified behavior. Until you demonstrate changed behavior, you haven�t learned a lesson.�

Until you demonstrate changed behavior, you haven�t learned a lesson. The same can be said of communication in general: if you haven't changed the audience's behavior, have you communicated anything?

No Wonder They're Called Deadlines

For some time now we've been coaching internal communication professionals to renegotiate the traditional "deliverables and deadlines" framework into something more strategic and more fulfilling. Today we have yet another good reason to do so: Deadlines raise heart attack risk six fold. So tell your CEO: Not only is your being a trusted advisor more satisfying ... it's good for you, too.

The Dehumanized Employee

CIO magazine's The Dehumanized Employee notes that modern information technology allows increasingly distant managers to make decisions that affect employees' day-to-day lives:

Where workers in Taylor's time at least knew the managers who profoundly affected their lives, employees in large organizations today often have no human connection to managers who exert enormous control over them. A century ago it was unusual for corporate headquarters to make a decision that affected employees' daily lives. It took a big decision with big consequences�the decision, say, to open or close a factory. Workers' routine operations within the factory were still controlled by immediate, highly visible supervisors. But in our time, employees are often affected not just by epochal decisions in the life of a company but by routine daily decisions made at headquarters located in another state or even another country. At Wal-Mart and other large retailers, for example, the pressure under which employees work depends not just on their immediate supervisors but on centralized decisions emanating from computerized headquarters that tell local managers how many (or rather, how few) person hours they are expected to use that week. Even at the level of what in Taylor's time would have been called the "shop floor," IT can separate frontline supervisors from employees and make it easier to manage harshly.

Under such a system, employees may feel increasingly invisible and powerless.

Lessons re-learned

New technology systems. Often the subject of much scrutiny and dissatisfaction. Why? Often times the group implementing the new system does not consult those who will ultimately use it on a regular basis before they launch. The implementors may offer training classes, but they don't acutally ask for feedback. The NY Times (registration required) outlines the consquences of this kind of approach in a recent article about the San Jose Police Department: Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface. The take away? If the IT group brings you to the table early in the process, make sure your communication approach involves appropriate feedback channels, stakeholder management, and involvement activities--before you ask employees to start using the system.

Strategic off-sites

When I received my daily quote from Fast Company this morning, I experienced a bit of a negative reaction...for about one millisecond. Here's what it said:

"People who are involved in planning off-sites aim too low."�Brenda Williams, Founding Partner, the Lab

Brenda is probably right.

Winning the Relationship Game

Fast Company's Winning the Relationship Game makes the point that "In business, relationships matter," and offers advice under these headings:

• It's all about them
• Be an idea farm
• Seize every opportunity to connect
• It's all about you
• This is your job
• Better than networking
• It's never too late

Hitting 'Send' Too Soon

The Wall Street Journal's Hitting 'Send' Too Soon (subscription required) notes that people who should know better still make some serious e-mail mistakes. Some suggestions they cite:

• "People tend to think of e-mail as being secured communication between the recipient and the person who's sending the e-mail — that's not the case."
• "Don't hit the 'send' button unless you would be comfortable having your mother, grandmother, or a competitor reading what you just wrote on the front page [of a newspaper]."
• "When I'm putting something into an e-mail to a client, I pretend I'm putting it on letterhead. Effectively it's going out on company letterhead, it just doesn't look like it when you're typing it."

Gender Differences in Communication

The Wall Street Journal's How to Become A Better Communicator (subscription required) addresses gender differences in communication:

There is a danger in being simplistic when discussing how men and women communicate in the workplace. Speech habits and body language vary from person to person regardless of gender. Some use styles that seem more characteristic of the opposite sex. But whether the result of early socialization or the chemistry in our brains, the differences are worth paying attention to in the workplace, career-development experts say.

Some examples from Lois P. Frankel, author of Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office:

She says women sometimes use too many words to deliver serious messages, tend to downplay their contributions and sometimes undermine themselves by using qualifiers and other vague language. Other common pitfalls: phrasing statements as questions and using an upward inflection at the end of statements, which indicates doubt. On the other hand, by using few words some men can appear to close off conversations too quickly, while others tend to overemphasize their individual performance when, in fact, a team is responsible for results. Many men and women need to do a better job of being direct in their communication while "adding inclusive behavior at the end of their conversations," says Ms. Frankel.

Hold the Phone

You may have heard that new, Internet-based phones can offer free long-distance calling, but VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) has much more to offer. Hold The Phone shares some surprising examples of how hospitals, law firms, and other organizations are deploying Internet telephony:

To Win Advancement, You Need to Clean Up Any Bad Speech Habits

The Wall Street Journal's latest "Managing Your Career" piece, To Win Advancement, You Need to Clean Up Any Bad Speech Habits (subscription required), points to the growing popularity of speech coaching:

Whether you sound like an adolescent, curse at colleagues, talk tentatively or exhibit an abrasive Brooklyn accent, you risk derailing your career because you appear unpolished. [...] A growing number of businesses retain speech coaches for rising stars with speech flaws. This assistance typically costs a company between $250 and $400 an hour. A coach analyzes an individual's discourse, pinpoints shortcomings and videotapes each session. Clients take the tapes home and do daily drills in front of a mirror.

Some Ideas Are So Bad That Only Team Efforts Can Account for Them

The Wall Street Journal's latest "Cubicle Culture" piece, Some Ideas Are So Bad That Only Team Efforts Can Account for Them (subscription required), takes a contrarian look at teamwork:

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, says that teams represent an effort to pool diverse skills and knowledge, but they typically fail in three ways. First, people don't recognize that the interesting and relevant information they possess is interesting and relevant, so they don't share it. Second, people often overlook the fact that colleagues have opposing interests. ('Layoffs? They can't come from my group.') Third, people withhold information deliberately. Teams often work better when they have at least some conflict, particularly if there is more than one dissenter, says Michael Useem, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. 'A single devil's advocate or whistleblower faces a really uphill struggle,' he says. 'But if you have one ally, that is enormously strengthening.'

The Realist-Idealist Dilemma

In Fast Company's The Realist-Idealist Dilemma, James O'Toole defines what it means for a leader to be a realist or an idealist:

Realists believe that most people are evil and, therefore, do whatever it takes to maintain power and protect the interests of their nations or organizations. Faced with a crisis, they respond depending on how they read the situation. In contrast, idealists, like Reagan, believe that most people are good and that the world can be made a better place if leaders adhere to inviolable values. In crises, idealists stick with principles.

In his opinion, both realists and idealists can make good leaders — and either can stand anywhere along the political spectrum — but they can only make good leaders if they're either realistic or idealistic, but not both:

The leadership lesson for GW — and for any leader — is simple: Followers don't much care if leaders are realists or idealists, but they distrust inconstancy. To make a mark in history, as Reagan did, Bush must decide which one he is. Doing so will require moral courage, because it entails commitment to a predictable mode of behavior. And that, ultimately, is what followers seek in their leaders. As Bush said: "Ronald Reagan believed ... in the courage and triumph of free men. And we believe it, all the more, because we saw that courage in him."

O'Toole's point (stripped of its political context): Followers don't much care if leaders are realists or idealists, but they distrust inconstancy.

Dubious Achievements in Employee Communication

This one comes from Central Ohio:

Papa John's General Manager Jeanette Zimmerman lives next door to the 701 E. State St. business she runs. So, she sees much of what goes on there. When she left to take her husband to work at 6:30 Monday morning, everything seemed normal. She returned 15 minutes later to find the unexpected: Two men heading for Papa John's front door. "They walked up to the store and they had a key, and I'm like, 'Excuse me. Can I help you?'" Zimmerman said. "They said, 'You're out of a job. We're closed.'" Although she managed the local store, she was among the last to know.

Sun Exec Says "It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog"

Last March, we boldly predicted that: "By the end of 2005, any organization that really appreciates internal communication as a strategic business function will have figured out how to use weblogs to increase communication effectiveness." In the current issue of Fortune, Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, makes an even stronger assertion:

"I don't have the advertising budget to get our message to, for instance, Java developers working on handset applications for the medical industry. But one of our developers, just by taking time to write a blog, can do a great job getting our message out to a fanatic readership...Blogs are no more mandated at Sun than e-mail. But I have a hard time seeing how a manager can be effective without both [emphasis added]."

Do Parents Make Better Employees?

As I sat at the breakfast table Sunday morning and my 16-month-old son was in his high-chair throwing scrambled eggs in his hair, I was breezing through the Sunday New York Times at record pace when this article caught my eye: Parenting Can Create Better Employees, by Lisa Belkin. (log-in required) While I didn't have time to finish the article before I had to rescue my son from his breakfast, I think the point is worth noting: While there is much talk about the complications of blending parenting and work (i.e. flexible schedules, etc.), there is much less talk about the leadership skills that can emerge when an employee becomes a parent (i.e. juggling tasks, communicating simple messages, managing competing agendas, soothing executives feelings, etc.). We often tell clients that you lead everywhere in life, so the leadership skills you use at home may also serve you well at the office.

Rate Your Leadership Mettle

How Do You Rate? presents an amusing and insightful (but sarcastic) test of leadership mettle, including such questions as:

5] Your biotech firm has set a goal to enter into clinical trials by the end of the year on a drug that helps seniors live more comfortably. How do you get skeptics to buy in?

1. 'That's for others to worry about, not me.'
2. Communicate the vision of improving your parents' quality of life. If you succeed, employees, the company, and the community all benefit.
3. Hold pizza parties every Friday!

The Knowledge Network Becomes the Organization

Buckman Labs Is Nothing but Net explains that "Buckman Labs makes chemicals, but it sells knowledge" -- with the help of the Buckman knowledge sharing system, K'Netix:

It came to him eight years ago, when he was flat on his back, confined to bed after rupturing his back. Unable to get up, unable even to sit up, Buckman propped a laptop computer on his belly and took dead aim on the real power of knowledge. "Lying there thinking how isolated I was," says Buckman, recalling his two weeks in bed. "I got to thinking about what I wanted." What he wanted was information, not just for himself but for all his people, a steady stream of information about products, markets, customers. And he wanted it to be easily accessible, easily shared. A relentless student of business and management writing, he had recently read a comment from Jan Carlzon, the former head of SAS, and it had struck a chord with him: "An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility."

Cowards of the Year

Fast Company published its 2003-2004 list of the spineless in this month's issue. See who's on it here. How to become a member of the cowardly clan: act inconsistently, make soft decisions, or take no responsibility for your actions. The list reminds us of an important strategic communication fact: Leadership behavior and policy decisions send the most powerful messages. The best leaders get it, and the best communication professionals help leaders to understand the implications of their decisions and the power of the convincing decision.

Happy customers make for loyal customers

The Wise Marketer reports...

The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) stands at an overall score of 74.4 (out of 100) for the second quarter of 2004, remaining at its ten-year peak for the second quarter running. ... But higher satisfaction scores have implications for companies beyond simply making customers happier. "A company that improves in customer satisfaction tends to perform better financially by generating more repeat business, which leads to greater profits and a higher stock price," explained Fornell. "Sales of Apple computers are up and its stock value has improved by more than 50% over the past year.

You can view the entire article here: US customer satisfaction levels off at ten-year high

I know I put it somewhere...

According to a recent study from the University of Washington, people are much more likely to misfile and lose track of paper information than information stored on a computer:

More than half of survey participants admitted losing track of a paper document at least once a week -- more than twice the number of people who reported losing electronic information. The result? While more than 60 percent reported being satisfied with their ability to handle computerized records such as e-mails, electronic documents and Web bookmarks, only 31 percent were satisfied with their ability to organize their papers.

Blogs: Losing their innocence?

Friendster, the group that popularized social networking services, recently fired one of their developers for information she posted on her private blog. This isn't the first time we've seen this (Microsoft fires worker over weblog), nor will it be the last. To help protect organizations and employees, however, it seems like it's time to update the old policy and procedure manual and communicate these changes to make sure employees understand the implications of publishing a personal blog.

Beyond Bullets

Don't know how we've managed to miss this site: Beyond Bullets, a weblog devoted entirely to the effective use of PowerPoint (with a good dose of new media theory tossed in as well).

"IT company gives workers free beer; wins award"

A recent Register article describes what sounds like a truly great place to work:

A US software company that gives its workers free beer on Friday afternoons has been named the "Best Small Company to Work for in America". Analytical Graphics, Inc (AGI) also gives workers access to a free laundry service, free meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner - all week and access to free snacks, confectionary and drinks. And if there are concerns that all this free nosh might pile on the pounds, there's also a gym. Which is free. In fact, AGI spends around $1m a year on freebies and perks for staff, according to the Detroit Free Press. As a result, workers are more productive, motivated and enjoy coming to work - while the company saves buckets loads of dosh in recruitment and training.

Is there a downside? Perhaps. Employees tend to be more sensitive to, and conscious of, what you take away from them (versus what you give them). Since it does not appear that AGI explicitly ties the provision of these perks to organizational performance (if they do, the article doesn't mention it), the company probably cannot ever scale back the beer and other freebies, even modestly, without jeopardizing productivity and morale.

Service with a Smile

Scottish Gas is trying to improve the service provided to their customers by sending call center employees jokes throughout the day.

Even on the other end of a phone, the effect of a smile is contagious. There is no doubt that it assists with sales and resolving customers' inquiries. The Saturn screens in the office mean that we can turn on hi-tech 'laughing gas' in the form of jokes and light-hearted messages for employees � as well as the daily business information � which help to create a positive atmosphere.

Read the entire article here from The Herald...

44 Percent of Large Companies Employ Staff to Read Outgoing Emails

From ZD Net:

Large companies are now so concerned about the contents of the electronic communications leaving their offices that they're employing staff to read employees' outgoing e-mails. According to research from Forrester Consulting, 44 per cent of large corporations in the United States now pay someone to monitor and snoop on what's in the company's outgoing mail, with 48 per cent actually regularly auditing e-mail content. The Proofpoint-sponsored study found the motivation for the mail paranoia was mostly due to fears that employees were leaking confidential memos and other sensitive information, such as intellectual property or trade secrets, with 76 per cent of IT decision makers concerned about the former and 71 per cent concerned about the latter.

(Via GP)

Detecting Deception

Science News highlights the current research on detecting deception:

"How can you tell when people are lying?" From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze. "This is . . . the most prevalent stereotype about deception in the world," says Charles Bond of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, who led the research project. And yet gaze aversion, like other commonly held stereotypes about liars, isn't correlated with lying at all, studies have shown. ... By studying large groups of participants, researchers have identified certain general behaviors that liars are more likely to exhibit than are people telling the truth. Fibbers tend to move their arms, hands, and fingers less and blink less than people telling the truth do, and liars' voices can become more tense or high-pitched. The extra effort needed to remember what they've already said and to keep their stories consistent may cause liars to restrain their movements and fill their speech with pauses. People shading the truth tend to make fewer speech errors than truth tellers do, and they rarely backtrack to fill in forgotten or incorrect details.

Read the whole thing.

'No, communication is terrible!'

Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos shares one of his more iconoclastic moments:

If Bezos's personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos's more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. "People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, 'No, communication is terrible!'" The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the 'two-pizza team': If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.

Of course, this "communication is terrible" message was coming from the head of a company with a very strong culture and a clear mission, trying to innovate at all costs.

Wikis versus Occupational Spam

We have previously discussed the (fairly) new collaborative technology of wikis. Now the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) discusses wikis (versus e-mail and blogs):

Some analysts have dubbed collaboration via e-mail 'occupational spam' -- endless, time-consuming and often pointless. Enter the wiki, which has aims to revive the idea of the 'writable Web,' which was how the medium itself was originally conceived by many of its earliest proponents. Using simple software, it allows anyone with Web access to post a page of information that is accessible to anyone else in the same group or organization. Others in the group can then modify, enhance or update it. To keep track of changes, old versions are retained. A wiki has been likened by some to a giant digital white board in a constant state of movement and creation.

Technology Or Credibility?

From Telephony World: