by Adam Hartung | Oct 8, 2009 | Current Affairs, General, Innovation, Leadership, Lock-in, Web/Tech, Weblogs
"Companies Say No to Friending or Tweeting at Work" is the headline in The National Law Journal. According to the article, somewhere between 54% (according to a Robert Half survey) and 76% (according to a ScanSafe survey) of companies block employees from connecting to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Plaxo, etc. The reasons sound so traditional – starting with lost productivity and moving on to fear of data theft.
And of course, there's the bogeyman to worry about too.
In the 1940s and 1950s success was all about mass production. Show up for work on time, don't be late, don't be absent, and do your job. We had assembly lines to operate. Making stuff meant we needed to get people into the plant, and have them do their job. The more efficient people were, the more things a plant could make – be it cars or washers or televisions. So control everything the employee did on the job to make sure each minute is spent welding, typing, adding, inspecting or whatever their task. Fredrick Taylor became a business guru, running around with stopwatches calculating how to get more work out the door by controlling everything workers did.
Have people noticed that its 2009? Today, there are places where such focus on task implementation is important. But most of those places aren't in the USA. Those kinds of jobs have moved elsewhere. Even in America's manufacturing plants (and in most plants in the developed world) it is more important that an employee be thinking about their work. More gains are made by intelligent application – new ideas for processes or activities – than from Tayler-ist style efforts to whip people into working harder and more efficiently. Would you rather have a drone employee (a human robot) or a smart employee thinking about how to be more productive and successful? Sweat shop behavior doesn't make more money in a world where intelligence and insight are worth a lot more than hours in the chair.
Yet Lock-in to old efficiency notions still remain. In the 1930s there was a movement to ban adding machines for fear the tapes (the old white tape that ran out the top) would be stolen by employees. Better to stick with humans doing the adding – less risky. When PCs came along practically all IT departments wanted to ban them – saying that they posed an inherent risk to productivity (people might use them for things besides work) and employees would capture data on them and leak it to competitors. When the internet emerged in the 1990s huge numbers of employers banned access because they didn't know what people would do on the web and they feared everyone would be shopping all day, or emailing their friends. And who knew what kind of information they would leak about the company! In each instance, a tool that dramatically improved business performance was met with "this will hurt productivity. And don't you think this poses a serious risk?"
For those who aren't looking for the bogeyman, this presents an opportunity. Those who first adopted adding machines quickly improved performance – and those who adopted PCs improved productivity (spreadsheets and word processing gave early adopters huge advantages) – and those who adopted the internet rapidly sold more to new customers while finding more low cost suppliers and automated lots of business processes in their supply chain taking down operating costs. These innovations created Challenges to old ways of doing things, but they also created huge opportunities for those willing to Disrupt old patterns and use White Space to see how they could improve their business.
Every day millions of people are starting to use – and millions more are increasing their use of – social networks. You can get an incredible sense of the pulse of many communities. You find out what's going on with customers, potential customers and colleagues incredibly fast. These networks help sift through billions of megabytes of data and bring critical items of importance to you (and your business) remarkably fast. They act as a new distribution system for information – think of them as a water cooler on steroids taken to the "nth" power. These are not on-line solitaire environments, these are places where people exchange information and learn. Really fast.
Today, having informed employees who can take action separates winners from losers. Those who want to be in the forefront of competition are already thinking about how these environments connect them with critical information. Help them connect to customer and vendor communities. Help them improve productivity by increasing the pace of information exchange. If you aren't afraid of the bogeyman then you have an opportunity to get a leg up on the fearful by not only accepting, but encouraging the use of social networks. The faster you "get it" the better off you'll be. It's likely to introduce ideas for Disrupting your business during this downturn and opening White Space to get you growing again!
Postscript –
An article in the recent New Yorker Magazine "Not So Fast" takes a deep look at Fredrick Taylor and the history of "scientific management." According to the article, Taylor and his colleagues often made up their data, and their conclusions, and the results they promised were almost never achieved. Interesting reading on how the myth was created, and became legend. Perhaps sending most of what was taught for decades as "business best practice" at leading business schools in a seriously misguided direction. Well worth a read for those with time to pick up a little history – and some insights to how business myths are developed and promulgated.
by Adam Hartung | Sep 28, 2009 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, General, Leadership, Lock-in, Television, Web/Tech, Weblogs
Lock-in causes us to keep moving in the same direction, to continue behaving the same way, even when competition and market shifts makes it a surety that the direction we're heading will produce poorer returns. Blacksmiths who ignore the shift to automobiles. Printers who ignore the shift to photocopiers. As I often point out, unless something attacks the Lock-in, we are amazingly able to keep right on going the same direction – blithely ignoring the inevitable problems.
"I read Playboy for the articles" is a Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article which outlines just how far we all will go to avoid dealing with internal conflicts caused by undertaking behavior we know is unjustifiable. (Download full pdf text of White Paper here.) According to the article:
- Because people do not want to be perceived as (or feel) unethical or
immoral, they make excuses for their behavior—even to
themselves.
- People cope with their own questionable actions in a number of ways by rationalizing, justifying, and
forgetting—a remarkable range of strategies allowing them to maintain a
clear conscience even under dubious circumstances.
Which leads me to the #1 excuse I hear. "I don't get it." I bring up to people – especially those who are over 35 – the power of modern technology tools. For example, ask a 40 year old why two 20 year old girls sitting across a table will text each other and the answer is "I don't get it." Tell them you know teenagers who spend more time at the computer monitor on-line than watching TV and the answer is "I don't get it." Hear someone say "my cell phone is more important than my car" and you hear "I don't get it.' And the biggest one of all, tell this person they need to open up accounts and go everyday to Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, MySpace and Plaxo and you hear "you're kidding – right? Why anyone spends time on those – I don't get it."
Every time I hear "I don't get it" I wince. Because that person just admitted "I'm willing to get out of step with the market, and risk having my skills become obsolete. I'm happy doing what I do, and I don't see why I need to doing something new and different. I'm sure the world is not evolving away from me, and I've chosen to remain Locked-in to where I've been rather than learn what's going on with these new solutions." See what I mean? When you read my interpretation makes you wince, doesn't it?
Our parents used to tell us when we talked on the telephone "Why don't you just go to their house, I don't get it." When we listened to rock-and-roll "Your music makes no sense, I don't get it." When we thought everybody needed a car they'd say "We always walked, why do you need a car? I don't get it."
"I don't get it" is the proverbial excuse justifying Lock-in. It allows us to walk away from a shift that's right in front of us, and remain stuck. It allows us to feel like we're OK to remain – well — ignorant.
So, the next time you hear yourself saying "I don't get it" it's time to stop, Disrupt yourself, and find some time to get it. It's time to review your willingness to remain Locked-in, and invest some resources in trying new stuff instead of Defending & Extending. Because if you do create some White Space you can learn – and the first who "get it" will be the ones who do best in the market, getting the best results.
PART 2 – a personal extension for those with time to read.
When my son died last week, at age 21, he left a brother age 20 and a brother age 18. He also left hundreds of friends his own age. These people shared what all of us shared at that age – a deep desire to talk to each other, to communicate, to cry in groups, to grieve, to find things in the past that made them happy. To capture time in a bottle by reflecting on Alex's life. And they also shared the simple fact that they have almost no money, precious little time, and a host of responsibilities to school, family and work.
30 years ago my generation would have made a few phone calls. Maybe a few of us gotten together for an hour. But our talks would have been mostly a small group, and for a short time.
The last week I've been living on Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, et.al. I have used all these tools for at least several months, and in some cases years. But I used these through the filters of my history. I saw them as extensions (D&E) of old ways I communicated. Finally, now, I get it. These communities are an entirely different way of communicating. I different way of building a community. And in many ways, it is MORE vibrant and more honest than anything ever before. LIkewise, it is real time. And it is open to everyone. It is extraordinarily effective. And it is unbelievably healthy.
For those who question their child's life on-line, you are looking from your historical reference. What happens in this environment is incredibly open – thus very informative. It is remarkably honest – in ways everyone finds very hard to be face-to-face. And it is very fast. There are no boundaries – no race, no origin questions, no location questions, no income questions. It is the most egalitarian, comprehensive method of creating a self-forming community to accomplish a goal I've ever seen. Way beyond anything I've ever seen my generation accomplish by developing plans and subsequently focusing on execution.
Within hours, my son's friends found out he had died 500 miles away – and his Facebook page exploded. It became a central hub to exchange information of all kinds about his accident, his life, his funeral. Within hours almost his entire world new what happened – far faster than any "family call chains" we ever created. As they searched to learn more, within a day someone found a video of the accident scene and the helicopter whisking him away —- something that would have taken my generation weeks to find (if at all) and share. And the videographer was put in contact with me, able to give me first-hand info about the accident scene.
His brother created a new Facebook site dedicated to honoring Alex the next day. Within hours 200 people were hooked up. Before week end the number went to 400. This became universe central for this topic. There was no CEO. No Director of communications. Just a self-organizing activity that brought together hundreds of people who wanted to talk about Alex. Very effective discussion.
Since Alex's 22nd birthday is 9/30 – some spontenous person said a birthday party should be thrown. Within hours an event had been created, and hundreds were talking about whether they could attend or not (by the way, it's going to be on 10/2 in Chicago.) All kinds of talk about who had to work, who could come, what to bring. Again, self-organizing and spontaneous and remarkably effective.
By the time the newspaper published an article on the accident, and my son's obituary, it was so old news I don't think anybody cared. And certainly the only people who learned this way were those who were – over 40.
If you aren't using these tools – if you don't "get it" – this is one place I would recommend some personal White Space investment. If you do, the payoff is extremely high. If you don't, you're likely to find yourself as out of date as cobblers and blacksmiths faster than you think.
