Above and Beyond KM

In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable neighborhood association meeting this evening, my neighbor declared that he had to create a Twitter account right away.  What stunned all of us was the fact that this neighbor celebrated his 80th birthday several years ago. He is not exactly in the age bracket that you would normally expect to see flocking to social media.

What changed?

He was facing a situation that made him so boiling mad that he was willing to push out of his comfort zone to solve the problem. And what exactly was his problem? He was furious because he believed that he was paying an exhorbitant amount for his cable, internet and telephone service. To make matters worse, he was deeply disappointed by the quality of the service provided. And who is his provider? Time Warner Cable.

Another neighbor (in his late 50s) told us that when his teenage son had seen the family’s Time Warner bill, he uttered an expletive and then immediately set up a Twitter account for his father. Using that new account, the son posted a pithy tweet addressed to Time Warner (@TCW), complaining about the poor quality of the service and what he considered to be its outrageous price.

Now here’s the part that caught the attention of my 80-something neighbor (and the rest of us at the meeting, to be honest):  shortly after the teenager tweeted his upset with Time Warner, the company’s customer service department called them with an offer to make the situation better. Consequently, the neighbor with the tweeting teenager was able to report an improvement in service AND a substantial reduction in his monthly bill.

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about a couple of dollars here or there. Rather, we’re talking about prices so high that Craig Moffet, an analyst at the Wall Street firm Bernstein Research, felt completely justified in making the following observation:

The cable distribution giants like Time Warner Cable and Comcast are already making a 97 percent margin on their `almost comically profitable’ Internet services.

Clearly, I’m in the wrong business.

That said, the reaction of my neighbors provides an important reminder to us all. Social media enables an extraordinary amount of direct communication. It has an immediacy and effectiveness that my 80-something neighbor had been unable to match using the traditional methods of letters of complaint or long calls to scripted customer service representatives. Social media also provide a very public way of communicating your concerns. My neighbor’s complaint letters are undoubtedly sitting in a circular file somewhere, never to see the light of day. By contrast, a tweet can be retweeted many times over and every iteration is recorded by the Library of Congress or one of the many search engines. If a complaint publicized via social media goes viral, then a company has a major public relations disaster on its hands. If you don’t believe me, just ask United Airlines about guitars (nearly 13 million views on YouTube)!

Thanks to social media, David once again has a chance against Goliath. Thanks to social media, the public can erect public barricades to attract the attention of companies that are much larger and more powerful. Thanks to social media, we have a shot at leveling the playing field.

Earlier this evening, I posted a tweet directed at Time Warner Cable. I’ll let you know what Goliath says.

Just left a meeting of neighbors fed up with extortionate prices from Time Warner ( @twc ). Can’t wait until @verizonfios moves in!

— VMaryAbraham (@VMaryAbraham) March 8, 2013

[Photo Credit: Lyman Green]

They say that the three most important factors in determining the value of a property are “location, location, location.” We’ve certainly learned the truth of that old adage this week. We were among the lucky ones who live in a New York City neighborhood that did not lose electricity. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for many of our friends:

• Our friends K&R in Greenwich Village have no electricity, heat or water.
• Our friend MC, who lives in Long Island, cannot use her car because (a) she doesn’t have any electricity to open her garage door and (b) the nearby gas stations don’t have any fuel.
• Our friend KH in New Jersey is dealing with trees that fell on her property, as well as three kids at home. To make matters worse, she has no electricity and the local schools are closed.
• Our friend JH’s home on the New Jersey shore was flooded. She says that even the dresser drawers contain water.
• Our friend PS in Chelsea found shelter with a kind friend — until that friend’s home lost heat and hot water too. Now he’s looking for a way to leave town.

Life after Hurricane Sandy has been one of discovering new flexibility and new limits. Many of us have learned the huge value of working remotely — especially when most of the bridges and tunnels connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world are closed and when subways and commuter trains are out of commission. Face time suddenly becomes less pressing when there are other (virtual) ways of completing the work in a timely fashion. Add to that the fact that some office buildings (like mine) have electricity, but no heat or hot water, and then you begin to appreciate the advantages of working from home

Sandy has also reminded us of the value of staying connected via social media. Texting and Facebook have been lifelines for people trying to contact friends and families in the storm-affected areas. For those of us dealing with the aftermath of the storm, social media has allowed us to help each other with words of encouragement and practical acts of kindness. Friends on Facebook have posted information on subway openings, where to get a free shower or WiFi, and where to find places to charge your electronic devices. Meanwhile, Twitter has been an important source of official news and an essential part of emergency communication plans, according to an article today in The New York Times:

With Hurricane Sandy, public officials and government agencies have embraced social media to a greater degree than ever. For proof, look no further than the Twitter feed of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York: 400 messages on Tuesday, 300 on Wednesday and well over 100 on Thursday, featuring everything from photos of storm surge damage to updates on power restoration.

[...]

Although phone service has been spotty in some places across the Northeast, people with working signals have been reliant on texting and social networking to a degree not seen during previous disasters.

According to Frank Sinatra, New York is the city that never sleeps. But if you take a look at the fantastic photo of Manhattan by Brian Angell that I’ve posted above, you’ll see that a significant part of the city is still dark. Here’s hoping the lights come back to the Big Apple soon.

[Photo Credit: Brian Angell]

Col. Scott Reid is the Chief Knowledge Officer of the US Army JAG Corps. The JAG has about 2,500 lawyers, plus almost an equal number of support staff, plus the same number again in the reserves. Their offices are in 21 countries.

[These are my notes from the International Legal Technology Association's 2012 Conference 2012. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Their Strategy for Enterprise Social Networking. They aimed to create the largest network possible, keeping in mind costs, intuitive usage, respect for the Department of Defense firewall. They had very senior support from the start. Their key knowledge management presence is on milBook, which is part of milSuite. It is built in Jive. They also have a blog function (using WordPress) and are working on Eureka, an idea generation/evaluation tool. The JAG presence on milBook is called JAG Connect.
• Support/Administration. Each group in milBook is is hosted by a lawyer who is given specific responsibility for the role and community. They have over 15,000 individuals participating in 2660 communities. Approximately 20% of the members are contributors. (This is far better than the 90-9-1 participation rule.)
• Gamification in milBook. They award points to contributors. You can win extra points for providing an answer that someone else finds helpful. This gamification has proven to be a very helpful way to motivate and reward participation.
• More Like This. MilBook uses tags to find similar content and serves it up to the reader automatically.
• Lessons Learned. (1) Have a strategic plan. (2) Have communities that reflect functions rather than just the organizational map. (3) Marketing is key to encourage participation. (4) Include a pilot to test bugs and to win senior support. (5) When considering how to motivate participation, consider Daniel Pink’s observations regarding autonomy, mastery and meaning. These are key intrinsic motivators. The gamification also helps, but it provides extrinsic motivation.

[Scott, please review and let me know if my rapid transcription contains any errors. You and your colleagues have a terrific story. I want to be sure I reported it accurately. Thanks!]

What would you say if someone offered you the opportunity to free up as much as 25% of the work week for more productive purposes? Would you be willing to explore this further or would you discount it out of hand as wishful thinking? What if the source of this claim was the McKinsey Global Institute, the management consulting firm’s research organization?

The McKinsey Global Institute has just released a new study, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, that examines the potential impact of social technologies in four sectors: consumer packaged goods, retail financial services, advanced manufacturing, and professional services. This report makes the sit-up-and-take-notice claim that these technologies “could potentially contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value across the four sectors.”

That’s a lot of zeroes worth of added value. In fact, the study estimates that “by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals—by 20 to 25 percent.”

For those of you tend to skip over claims like this, I’d encourage you to back up and take another look since one of the sectors examined in the study is the professional services sector. That includes your law firm. If you were to read the report from the perspective of a legal professional services firm, what might you learn? Here are some money quotes from the study’s abstract:

Two-thirds of this potential value lies in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises. The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information. Additional value can be realized through faster, more efficient, more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises.

The amount of value individual companies can capture from social technologies varies widely by industry, as do the sources of value. Companies that have a high proportion of interaction workers can realize tremendous productivity improvements through faster internal communication and smoother collaboration.

To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected. Creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing the technologies themselves.

I’m betting that the law firm that masters social technologies would be a very attractive place to work. I’m also betting it could attract the high-performing knowledge workers it needs to be hugely successful. McKinsey calls the potential impact of social technologies in the enterprise “transformative.” Have you considered what these technologies could do for your firm?

[Photo Credit: Mark Smiciklas]

Larry Cannell is Research Director at Gartner Inc. At Gartner, he writes for information architects and everyone they influence. You can reach him on Twitter: @lcannell.

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2012 in Boston. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Innovations Since 2006. Social network sites, smartphone and tablet apps, business applications are all using activity streams. This has resulted in a more tech savvy user with greater demands in the workplace. And, it has changed the technology conversation within the enterprise.
• Individualizing the IT Experience. For years, IT has delivered an “application-centered” experience. Now IT needs to provide a “people-centered” experience at work. This is the great lesson from mobile devices and apps. It also represents a huge change for IT.
• What Does the Enterprise Social Experience Want? (1) Focus on the individual; (2) leveraging familiarity (e.g., familiarity gained through consumer social experiences on Facebook and the like), (3) acknowledge constraints — these are inevitable given the business, confidentiality and security requirements of business.
• The Social Online Workplace. Start with social messaging, then add collaborative content, as well as content from business applications that matters to the individual. This is an “inside out” focus that begins with the individual. The activity stream shouldn’t be in a separate silo — it should be available in different form factors and displayed within the context of where the individual chooses to work.
• How Can IT Enrich the Enterprise Social Graph? IT knows who works with whom. And IT knows what applications everyone uses. Imagine what could happen if IT could surface application data within a social graph? For example, showing John Doe information produced by Jack Smith because they both work with the same business application and are reasonably proximate within the organization’s social graph. IT could also recommend that John and Jack follow each other or get to know each other based on their shared work interests.
• Social Network Aggregation Services. Similar to other aggregation services such as search, these social network aggregation services combine content from multiple sources. This is challenging, the work is not trivial — it requires more than just APIs. Consequently, vendors will have to offer something more sophisticated for information architects.
• Working with Email and Instant Messaging. Each system works with different lists — address lists, lists of people I’m following, friends lists, buddy lists, etc. Rather than juggling all of these, we should be able to have a single list of the people I’m in contact with.
• Working with Documents. For years, we’ve put documents in files. Overtime, these become blackholes of content. Often, they become personally owned. Cannell believes it would be better if they were group-owned. This would facilitate collaboration. Then the activity streams could be integrated and displayed for the group.
• Portals. Portals are not de facto social. When badly implemented, they simply open a window on existing silos. They don’t fully integrate the content.
• Search. There is significant overlap between search and some social functionality. However social software is having an impact on search. For example, activity stream filtering/visualization. This is a newer way of doing faceted search. In addition, integrating tag clouds and allowing search on those could be powerful.
• Impact of Social on Business Applications. The innovation lies in displaying activity streams and social graph information within the context of a business application. Admittedly, this could give rise to security concerns: who controls access to an object embedded in an activity stream?
• What Should IT Do? (1) Focus on providing people-centered experiences rather than application-centered experiences. (2) Do not push social networks as the next email system. This diminishes the role of social software and may mislead the user. (3) Rethink IT priorities to enable “individual first.” Simplicity is personal and contextual. Reconsider “need to know” policies in terms of sensible information reuse. (4) Solicit line of business ownership. Treat social as an extension of business processes. (5) Data management and availability is critical. Data may be siloed and noisy. It will need to be aligned. (6) IT cannot own the social experience, it can own the technology. IT can help businesses understand the value and step up to own the social experiences.
• IT matters more than ever, but IT needs to change its priorities in order to be relevant in the Social Online Workplace.

Alan Lepofsky (Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research, Inc.) discussed some of the challenges facing social software and how to address information overload. His excellent slides are available on Slideshare. You can reach him on Twitter: @alanlepo.

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2012 in Boston. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• We’ve Been Chasing the Shiny New Toy.20 years ago, we thought that email would be the answer to all our problems. We were wrong. Then we thought it would be Knowledge Management. Now many work places won’t let you even mention knowledge management or KM publicly. Then we thought it would be portals. Not so much. Finally, we’ve pinned our hopes on social technology. How long do we think that will last???
• Navigating Activity Streams.We thought that surfacing activity streams would increase transparency. The concept was that by consolidating everyone’s information in one place, all of us would be smarter. Unfortunately, we’ve been drowning in information. After all, if you can’t handle your own email inbox, how can you ever hope to manage the “social inbox” that includes everyone’s information?
• What’s the Solution? Filter that Activity Stream. We can filter our stream by person, by group, by tags/topics, by key word or phrase, by time, or most importantly, by what most needs my attention. Tibbr allows you to create custom filters. Jive lets you to filter using a drag and drop function. Filters like these allow you to create custom streams. However, vendors tell us that most users rely on the default settings and don’t customize their interface. So it’s important that the vendors fine tune the algorithms. Alan thinks that Zite has found a great way to adjust what you’re seeing by allowing you to ask it to “show me more from….”
• Another Solution is to Organize into ListsGoogle Plus has done a good job of letting users to filter by individually created lists (e.g., Circles). Similarly, Facebook and Twitter have lists. However, in order to benefit from this, each user needs to set these lists up themselves. That may be more work than some are willing to invest. However, lists organized by people don’t always talk about the topics you care about. Therefore, it would be helpful to organize activity streams by interests, by topics.
• How to Manage Activity Streams.(1) Don’t put stuff in a stream that doesn’t belong there. (2) Implement a user interface that allows users to aggregate multiple streams (e.g., Tweetdeck or Hootsuite). (3) Organize content via lists. (4) Provide several notification options. (5) Manual filtering. (6) Automated filtering via analytics. (7) Showing what’s hot, what’s trending. (8) Crowd-sourced curation: taking advantage of the liking or flagging or tagging that your friends and colleagues do.
• Aggregated Social versus Integrated Social. There are unstructured business process such as status updates, sharing, Q&A, exception handling and expertise location. However, organizations also have structured business processes that work well and shouldn’t be jettisoned (e.g., Sales, HR, Markteing, Supply Chain, Engineering, Learning, Suport/Service.) If would be great if you could add a social layer to those structured business process and their existing tools. One approach is to put everything onto a social platform that aggregates all activity streams and business processes and displays them through a dashboard. This surfaces information to a wide audience and it enables discussion. However, this approach typically just links by to the system of record. It doesn’t embed the object. One solution is the “embedded experiences” approach (e.g., IBM Connections lets you see an object in a stream rather than forcing you to the underlying silo or tool). A different approach is social integration inside core business applications. For example, you add a social layer to well-established business tools (e.g., SAP), so the user does not need to skip back and forth between the application they work in most often and the company intranet/blog/wiki.
• What About Me??? When users log in, they want to see what they individually created, what they commented on, what they have “liked,” what I should be working on next. Take a look at likeabilitee — it’s a new tool for Facebook that allows a user to see materials according to what’s important to that user. It literally puts the user at the center graphically and show the user what resonated most with their network. Cisco is doing something similar. It allows you to sort materials based on what the user added/shared, the things people commented on, etc.
• Social Task Management. This issue focuses on helping users figure out what to do first, what tasks need to be completed. Several vendors are working on solutions that range from standalone functionality (e.g., you have to go to the vendor’s site to log tasks) to functionality that is embedded in social software. Some file sharing tools have added a task management layer that allows you to place work flow around the content you are sharing.
• Requirements of Task Management. Projects/milestons, repeatable tasks, commenting, workflow/dependences, etc. Imagine if this was integrated with your HR system. Wouldn’t that make it easier to generate periodic reviews? What if task management was integrated with the Finance system? Would that help capture billable tasks better?
• What’s Next? Sentiment analysis that helps you understand which of your employees are happy or disengaged, which ones are a flight risk. Big Data should be able to improve recommendations and search results.

Sara Roberts (President/CEO, Roberts Golden Consulting, Inc.) and Dr. Margaret Schweer (Managing Principal and Researcher, Tammy Erickson & Associates) are the speakers. This session focused on some “deeply embedded organizational assumptions that are no longer valid …and why they are no longer relevant.” They also discussed how “organizations will need to evolve to become Intelligent Organizations.”

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2012 in Boston. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Assumption #1: The Purpose of Collaboration is Obvious. Not so much. There is business case for the organization, but we also must understand the individual’s view: in what ways does collaboration help me do my job? Remember that collaboration is a volutary activity so we need to give individuals a good reason to collaborate.
• 10 Collaboration Intents. These are the situations in which collaboration makes most sense: Connecting previously unconnected ideas; co-creating products, services, experiences; engaging stakeholders (markets, communities, employees, partners); tapping people, expertise or other resources, as needed; coordinating in time and space; distributing work cost or risk; sensing emerging patterns (trends, opportunities, threats); pooling judgments; polling to gather input or determine group-wide preferences; coalescing around an emerging consensus, after debating multiple views.
• Assumption #2: Bigger is Better. The rule is not necessarily go big or go home. Rather, understand that organizations have a rhythm, a pattern. Enrollment begins at the individual level, one person at a time. Initial deployments often start with small groups focused on accomplishing specific tasks. These initiatives can then be scaled up as they demonstrate value and gather a solid base of users capable of spreading the word about the technology.
• Assumption #3: Build it and they will come. Not really. Collaboration is sustained not because of a whiz bang technology platform, but because it is nurtured at the level of the individual. Trust builds quality content, which in turn attracts more contributions. Community management is an important role to help nurture contribution and collaboration.

[They skipped Assumption #4 due to lack of time.]

• Assumption #5: The Real Value in Collaboration is Connecting People to Content. No. We don’t want to create the “document mortuary.” We don’t want to simply digitize our physical workplace. Rather, we need to connect people to each other in new and meaningful ways, and then change the way we work together. The new way of working is “narrating your work.” What does this mean? [It can't just be about explaining how you do what you do since we don't always understand exactly what we do. See my earlier piece on Topspin and KM.] For people who are interested in learning more, the presenters suggest looking at Susan Ambrose’s work in the education area.
• Collaboration Readiness Audit. You should assess your organization’s readiness for collaboration. This focuses on decision making, processes, diversity, culture, for example. If the organization does not value creativity, it may be difficult to foster collaboration.
• HR and KM. One rich area for HR is in the knowledge space. HR knows the culture and can help with knowledge-sharing, transparency and collaboration initiatives.

Sara Roberts (Roberts Golden Consulting) moderates this session involving Lisa Bonner (AVP, Contemporary Work Practices, The Hartford Insurance Company), Erin Grotts (Director of Internal Communications and Collaboration, SUPERVALU) and Dan Pontefract (Head of Learning & Collaboration, Telus).

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2012 in Boston. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Start with Your Culture in Mind. Dan Pontefract believes that without culture, there’s no engagement, no collaboration or a shared single vision (panoptic view). “If we want to build a culture of collaboration, we do not want to implement a collaboration of cultures.” By contrast, Erin Grotts thinks that culture is a little overused. Rather than trying to manage the culture, she decided to build a place that amplified the things that people in the organization already liked about their corporate culture.
• Treat Engagement as the GoalDon’t waste time on “busyness” metrics. It doesn’t matter how many times someone blogs. What matters is how engaged that person actually is. Telus uses surveys and benchmarks against Aon Hewitt data.
• You Need a New Leadership Philosophy. Telus dumped the old competency models in favor of a new framework that promotes open, connected and transparent leadership. If you want collaboration to occur, you can’t just dump the toolset on your people. You need to create a leadership framework that supports the desired cultural change. To be successful, you need to straight talk, honesty.
• The Organization has to put it’s money where it’s mouth is. If you want openness and transparency, you can’t censor. “If you muzzle, you risk irreparable damage.” Focus on the desired behavior, not the tools. In the experience of Telus, you can change the tools without disrupting collaboration provided the right behavior has been established and supported.
• What Incentives Work? Don’t lead with money. Recognition that improves the “social street cred” of the individual will provide greater incentive. The talent war has already started. Hanging onto key people is critical. The Hartford is internally competitive. They posted a leader board and awarded badges for updates on customer calls. Interestingly, the pilot group participating in this badge program outperformed the sales personnel outside the pilot group. Gamification is a 21st century way of leading and thinking. You will stay longer and work harder when tackling a challenge in a group. SUPERVALU doesn’t use gamification. Rather, the CEO is active in Enterprise 2.0 and publicly recognizes the people who exhibit collaborative behaviors.
• Leading Through ChangeTrust and respect are earned. Leaders need to understand that. They can earn trust and respect by doing what they say, delivering on their promises.
• Embrace Lack of Control.Change management tactics are often another way of trying to maintain control of the organization. With Enterprise 2.0 deployments, tight control can choke the life out of collaboration. This will be a tough message for corporate leadership, so you’ll need to educate company leaders.
• Legal Challenges.The Hartford is an SEC-regulated company. Therefore, they needed to involve the legal department early especially with respect to privacy and confidentiality concerns. However, Lisa Bonner believes that 100% of their employees are adults and 99% do not want to be fired. Their guiding principles are be professional and responsible. Don’t post anything online that you don’t want your mother or boss to read. This seems to be working fine for The Hartford.
• What Analytics Do They Use? SUPERVALU maps internal social networking of an individual with that individual’s performance. Soon they will be able to do “mood analysis” of blogs. They also use employee surveys. At Telus they survey both employees and clients to determine performance. The key question to clients: would you recommend Telus?

Jared Spataro, Senior Director, SharePoint (Microsoft) and Rob Gubas, VP Global Marketing (Colliers International) are the speakers. Colliers is a commercial real estate company.

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2012 in Boston. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Key Technology Trends Connecting technologies (leading to a connected enterprise), social, mobile, cloud, cross-org collaboration. While each are interesting, combining them can be very powerful.
• Connected Experiences + Single Platform.This is Microsoft’s vision. It applies to Office and, of course, SharePoint. Microsoft calls this “The Connected Enterprise.”
• Social Collaboration at Colliers. They have a collaborative culture and wanted the technology to support this. Further, they work in a knowledge intensive industry and needed to share that knowledge efficiently. They also needed to facilitate growing mobility in how their people work. They wanted to connect people, connect people to client information, make data visible and introduce transparency.

This panel discussion involved Chris Gramms (Hackathon community manager), Mary Wolf (Yum! Brands), Nyla Reed (Educe), Dave Mason (Mozilla). They are involved with “Mix Management” that is focused on reinventing modern management.

[These are my notes from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2012 in Boston. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• The Management Hackathon This is a collaborative effort to reinvent management so that it works better in the age of the internet. They found 900 people around the world from a variety of organizations who were interested and then hosted the asynchronous conversations on a Saba platform over several months. They developed 20 full management hacks. They started by identifying everything that is wrong about management today. Then they identified what was right about the internet and asked what could be applied to modern management.
• Hacks Must be Radical AND Practical. The hack needs to be radical to make a difference in the organization. However, it must also be practical and easy to implement. If it requires a huge change management program, it is much harder to implement. The beauty of hacks is that they let you chip away at a problem until you’ve made an impact.
• Hacks Must be Simple. In the coding world, hacks were created by lazy coders. While this isn’t necessarily about rewarding laziness, management hacks should promote simple and easy improvements.
• Hack:Embracing “Skills 2.0″ How do you actually start developing the requisite organizational mindset? Are currect competency models structured to support the adoption of these technologies. They created a quick assessment (20 questions) that help particpants understand what E2.0 skill that already excel at and should use to improve your organization.
• Hack: The Freedom/Accountability Swap. This is a “stealth” hack. It doesn’t require senior management approval to adopt it. Just start by initiating a conversation with your colleagues in which a manager and her subordinates identify places where they have high freedom, low freedom and then figure out what level of accountability is mutually acceptable.
• Hack: Open Up Clip by Clip.Start by opening up processes within the organization. For example, begin with introducing transparency into how paperclips are procured and distributed. This is the type of process that most don’t find threatening and, therefore, should be willing to reform.
• Why Points Trump Hierachy.This NOT a stealth hack. It’s principle is that no one receive rewards on thhe basis of past achievement, but rewards are given on the basis of points given for work curently done for the company and within the last year. This should eliminate outsize pay packages that don’t map to actual performance.
• Hack: Leader Meter. This hack focuses on helping to uncover the natural leaders within the organizations, regardless of where they sit on the org chart. What’s key is for the organization to see them AND for the individual themselves to recognize their promise.
• Hack: The Anonymous Hero.This hack focuses on allowing people to suggest innovations anonymously. This means that the idea rises or falls on the merits.And then the person proposing a good idea can be identified as the hero.