The Social Organization

20 Years of the Web - My Take

EMC did a great compilation of perspectives of the Web at 20 in their latest edition of ON Magazine. Len Davanna shared his thoughts and threw the gauntlet to me.  It is an interesting milestone to consider because it essentially spans my adult life. In that regard I have been incredibly fortunate to sit at the cusp of a world altering technology change.  It's a little like that game 'what did you grow up without'. For me, I didn't even have a TV growing up, let alone what we currently call 'devices'.  My father did use a reel-to-reel recorder to capture some of my more precious childhood sayings like 'durch fried dicken' and 'I amn't' but that is really the extent to which technology seemed to evade my early life. Going back one generation, my mother grew up in a farm house in Indiana with no running water or centralized heat.  I digress a bit but the technical change that I've witnessed in my lifetime and the lifetime of close relatives is astounding. Mind-boggling even.  Gives me pause.

I first started using the Web (although I started using computers in the early 80s) in college to send text-based emails to a friend who was in Russia for a post-graduate year.  I didn't have email access in my first job out of college but by the time I had joined a consulting firm in the mid-90s we had email and a remote connection so I learned early what it meant to work virtually, albeit on dial-up at hotel rates that would make one tear up today. It was there that I managed a section of the intranet and developed some very shoddy HTML skills. From there on out, I caught the internet software/services bug working at both an enterprise software company that built one of the new breed of online applications and at a web start-up in Silicon Valley under the tutelage of Guy Kawasaki, among others. The Web has been both good and bad for me professionally - it's opened up diverse opportunities for me and it's taken me on a roller coaster that definitely also has gone down. The experience however, has given me vast access to how the consumer and business world is being affected. Social technologies have now exposed and supercharged the fundamental architectural benefits of the Web and made those benefits available to the common person. The people of the world are now accessible to each other via a click.

But to answer more specific questions:

How has the web changed my life?

• I've used it to find jobs, apartments, cars, bookclubs, used furniture, sports teams, and yes - even my husband. That's pretty much the important stuff in life, right?
• The majority of my career has been in jobs or companies that could not have existed before I graduated from high school (so much for being Secretary of State)
• The new business dynamic has enabled me to start a business where I don't feel like I have to rely on push marketing and sales, which I have always been a bit uncomfortable with because I feel like a good product or service should be the bedrock of a company, not the ability to coercively convince customers.

So I'm a fan.

How has the Web changed business and society?

Society and organizations function based on what they understand about themselves and what they understand about their environments.  The Web has changed dramatically the speed of information flow, the reach of each individual, and the individual trust that often accompanies the information. The results are:

• The ability to understand much more deeply what the environment thinks of you and of other entities.
• The ability to make very quick decisions if you have a network of information suppliers whom you trust. The better you trust your network, the faster the decision making cycle.
• The ability to maintain lots of weak, persistent linkages whether between friends or business partners.

You can see where this might affect businesses. The older businesses that have entrenched cultures and processes to aggregate information and make decisions are at an increasing disadvantage to those that can quickly adjust and adapt to changing conditions - whether because their employees are actually loosely tied contractors or because they can meet the changing needs of a customer base before their competitors know there is a change afoot. I termed this Information Arbitrage in an early post but Tammy Erickson also wrote an interesting post for Harvard Business Review recently called The Moment Social Media Becomes Serious Business.

I think we'll spend the next decade or more adjusting our organizations to this new information environment and those that adjust faster will win market share.

What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years?

This is always a dicey question - if I had a clue about the potential of human creativity and innovation... well, I'm not sure I'd be sitting here blogging but... I'll take a whack at this. I think the web will consist of:

• Cloud-based access to almost all data, business logic, and applications.
• Personalized web interfaces that account for an individual's learning style, content/data needs, workflow needs (for home & work), privacy requirements, style preferences and it will proactively deliver 'smart' content, triggers, and connections relevant to our current activity. 
• A wide range of smart things (furnaces, cars, retail stores, etc) that deliver data, at appropriate times and contexts, to our current interface (PC, phone, tablet, car, fridge, etc.).
• Smart filtering controls that allow us to manage the flow in a way that gives us our sanity back if we want it.
• Individual publishing engines that share various information automatically with others in our network, based on rules and privacy structures we define.
• Organizations that feed data/content but who rely less and less on customer interfaces/websites.
• A vast digital divide that causes further political rifts between those with access and those without - and the resulting, amorphic anger that goes with being disadvantaged.

It's going to be a wild ride.  I'm ready!

The New Diplomats: Community Managers

My degree is in politics and international relations. I found the power dynamics and relationships between countries fascinating and ever-changing. While I pursued a career in international relationship and government, my career path took a turn when I realized that I found working in the bowels of bureaucracy (as well as the bowels of the Pentagon) to be maddeningly inefficient and slow. But that early training in politics and power structures has been hugely helpful in understanding all types of organizations and how individuals interact - perhaps better than any other degree could have. Working with community managers has been no exception and it got me thinking recently that the emerging role of the community manager was really quite similar to that of a diplomat. Like diplomats, community managers must be skilled at:

• Understanding without immediately drawing conclusions or offering solutions (i.e. excellent listening skills)
• Finding resources for others
• Understanding culture
• Communicating often subtle concerns and issues between two or more groups
• Gathering information and developing measured analysis
• Influencing outcomes
• Confronting situations in a constructive, non-defensive way

This thought in turn led to thinking about whether organizations other than governments should have the equivalent of the State Department. I recently caught up with John Reaves and Claudia Putnam who were also interested in this topic and we had an interesting conversation about how companies might incorporate community management more formally and whether there is a business case for something like a state department. After the conversation, I took a moment to look at the mission of the U.S. State Department. To me they are fundamentally responsible for the following:

• Creating a worldwide environment in which the U.S. can prosper, through relationships and alliances
• Reducing threats to the U.S., through alliances, intelligence gathering, and communication
• Collaborating with others to solve externalities that cannot be addressed by one nation alone
• Helping individual citizens navigate other countries

For organizations then, this mission might include:

• Creating an environment whereby the organization can best prosper, through relationships and alliances
• Reducing threats to the organization's growth through partnerships, intelligence gathering, and communication
• Collaborating with others to build standards that reduce negative externalities
• Helping employees interact appropriately with various communities

A few opportunities and issues came up when discussing this analogy:

• Can the benefits of having a major community management functional group be understood and tracked enough to justify it?
• How, particularly in this climate, do you convince management to fund innovative business deliver approaches like this?
• Community management would need to operate at both the transactional level - helping individuals navigate various other communities and at the strategic level - building high level awareness for the organization and feeding back intelligence.
• Without demarcated communities (nation-states), how would you go about defining these communities for an organization?
• Having a network of embassies/ambassadors and consulates with a focus on a specific constituent group could be a good model for community management. What if each also had some responsibility for marketing, support, sales, product, and service delivery to that community? Centralized roles (similar to country desks at the State Dept.) would support other functional groups and channel back issues and directives to the embassies while embassy staff would be 'embedded' in the community to which they were assigned.
• How do you convince companies to care about the history of a relationship with a constituent group and would community management own that history? It mostly gets lost today but is there a way to demonstrate its importance?
• Is it important to have deep analysis and research done on each community - how do you communicate the value of that and how do you share it in a way that is accessible to those who need it?
• How does community management interact with the rest of the organization? Who uses it as a resource? What specific activities and outcomes does it own? Does it have seat at the cabinet/management team level?

While the State Department model may not translate directly to business, it does give one pause. Diplomacy has been seen as an important and valuable tool for hundreds of years. Does government recognize something that business organizations do not? Or is diplomacy dead, in favor of the more transactional and measurable means of power and control - military force? Traditionally force has only been used once international situations escalate beyond the scope of diplomacy because military force has been very costly. Does this suggest perhaps that traditional sales or support models should only be used when community management fails?

Is this a model that works for you? Is it useful to consider or are there too many differences?

It's the Trough of Disillusionment and So Much More

We're in for an interesting ride. The social software market is going through a bumpy patch. The 'trough of disillusionment' is the third phase of Gartner's Hype Cycle and I think we are in its valley in the social software market.  For those that aren't familiar with the model, it's below:

Why are we here? Well everyone got pretty excited about social tools ability to spread information and the adoption rate by individuals has been phenomenal. If you need a refresher on adoption rates, re-view What is Social Media (not for polite company but gets the point across). So all you have to do is listen to the conversation and jump in, right?  That works quite well as an individual or even a small company.... but it doesn't take much size before an organization gets wrapped up in their own operations and drama, used to the way things are, and pretty rigid when it comes to change.  And what I think many people have not gotten is the magnitude of the change we need in organizations to take advantage of the new information environment - this is not just about a software category - it's about the fundamental nature of information exchange and relationships. It comes luring us with a 140-character text box - what could be simpler? But it amounts to complex information arbitrage - something I wrote about back at the beginning of 2008.

Business structures have been set up and optimized for an environment where information was very unevenly distributed. They used that inequity to maintain their margins, keep their employees, distribute profits, etc. Most large organization can't change very quickly and are largely operating as if that environment still existed. The problem? Information barriers are crumbling quickly outside organizations and savvy customers can easily know more about their vendors than the vendor employees do - with a little research. Customers can easily find other customers to confirm experiences. Customers who use a product day-to-day often know more about it than their vendor account manager who doesn't actually use the product. The days of glossing over a problem or using a 'smoke and mirrors' approach are dying.

What is a large organization to do? Setting up a Twitter account should be the last of their worries. Not only do customers have better information, the cost of sales has dropped and companies still have a huge sales and marketing organization that can't just be lopped off. They've got customers demanding answers to which they may not know or have a great answer. Because of the prior information inequality, relationships were not the highest priority thing to attend to. Even recently, I've seen a lot of senior customer advocates being cut from marketing departments because they don't have direct ROI and in tough times, they are the first to go. But relationships are becoming the core competitive differentiator. If I as the customer can get somewhat equal products for the same price (and increasingly that is likely because the customer has access to information by which to negotiate), I am going to do business with the company I trust and like - not the one that professes to be perfect but seems highly disingenuous. Middle management is used to being the conduit for information and the hard truth is we just won't need as many layers of management as we used to. For the managers we do need, we need a very different style of leaderships - one that facilitates rather than directs, that promotes others, and that ensures cross-functional alignment and consistency. 

Structure drives behavior and today's organizational structures are not set up for today's information environment. Companies need to manage their communities of constituents like consenting, opt-in adults. Winning that trust from people is hard when starting from zero but many companies have created antagonistic relationships with customers and so have even more work to do. So they start down the path - by creating a blog or setting up a Twitter account... and it looks like a lot of effort without the direct reward in the scale or timeframe of more traditional initiatives. And it can look like that for a pretty long time, because customers' validly developed skepticism is a hard thing to turn. And that's where we are generally. Companies are looking at all of these social initiatives and re-assessing. Some community managers are being let go. Other companies don't even realize they need a community manager. Some are slogging through and doing the hard work of change management.

The rest of 2009 and 2010 will separate the pack - those organizations that see the changing information environment and realize that it links directly with how they engage customers, partners, and employees will start seeing results after months or years of investment. Others will leave social initiatives on the side and ignore the changing dynamic at their financial peril. The power has shifted. The organization needs to be shaken up. We are just at the beginning of where this shift gets really interesting. Who's along for the ride?

Note: just saw a note on Twitter about how the head of BMW's US Marketing group moved all of his people into new roles... great example of how the break some long held habits and 'think differently'

The Company Your Targets Keep

In the past, because relationships and influences used to be so hidden from view, we had few options but to go directly to the person we were hoping to influence - whether to sell them something, convince them of a course of action, get support, etc.  Interestingly enough, except for people who are primed and ready to be influenced that tactic doesn't work all that well.

So this is where advertising has traditionally come in - something that gets in front of people, makes them aware, and warms them up.  But it also annoys most people because it gets in the way of something else they are trying to do. Social media is so effective because it allows people to get exposure and 'warm up' to ideas, products, or you through a trusted source - their existing connections. As an individual that is much more natural and much less forced. People are also much less likely to throw up barriers and a defenses against information when it comes from a trusted source and it is in a context that makes sense.

All of this suggests to me that if you are trying to get someone to try something, change their minds, or think differently.... going direct may not be the most effective way to do it, although that seems counter-intuitive. Instead, find the company your targets keep. Start with the people in your targets circle who are receptive to your message. Surround and envelop that target with company that is supportive of your goals. It's called triangulation and it works pretty well, especially if you are looking to build long-term, trusted relationships.  If you are looking for a quick transaction, it's probably not a good method for you because it does takes investment and thought.

I've been having the network conversation with more and more organizations - urging them to think about all of the influencers that surround their core target.  No person or organization exists in a vacuum. The more that they get your message from different parties that they trust, the more likely they will be proactively interested in your message.  I believe that this dynamic will make corporate partnerships even more of a strategic differentiator than they are today. It will also force companies to re-assess how cooperative they are in their markets and with competitors because any tactics seen as negative will reverberate and break down a web of trust around their targets.

Why does trust matter so much in today's business relationships? Well, Chris Brogan & Julien Smith can tell you but here's my perspective:

- The speed of information flow is increasing very rapidly which is causing decision cycle times to decrease rapidly. In an environment where people do not have the time to ponder and weigh options, they rely more and more on the trust they have in various information sources.

- High-trust relationships reduce pressures - whether that is performance pressure or margin pressure or time pressure. Trust relationships typically have a high degree of empathy and forgiveness which keeps the parties loyal to a relationship even when things go wrong - and it reduces negative confrontations.

Who are you trying to convince of something? Have you thought of your relationships with all of the parties in your targets network of influence?

The Value of Social Software and the Collapsing Cost of Content Management

The conversation around the ROI of social media/social software is one that gets batted around quite a bit and there are a couple of approaches to considering its impact:

• It improves existing metrics like awareness, positive brand association, lead generation, reduced support costs, etc.
• It improves relationships, increases serendipity, increases retention, increases innovation
• It reduces the cost of delivering the above performance

All of those approaches can be valid depending on what you are trying to achieve - a laundry list of metrics as well as some great commentary can be found here.

But I want to discuss a more fundamental shift that is taking place that is at the heart of social software's ROI - regardless of which metric you use to measure its effectiveness. Fundamentally social software does two things, it:

• Reduces the cost of content development and management
• Improves the value of the content

Content is what drives any business and the better the content, the better a business can align with its market.

First, social software collapses content authoring, cataloging, publishing, and distribution into one application. In the enterprise context that is particularly mind boggling. As an example, to publish a white paper, the process that I would go through in the past typically consisted of:

1. Draft the white paper in a desktop tool - transcribing notes and details regarding examples and case studies from other tools.

2. Send the white paper out to 10-20 interested parties. Remind them to edit. Remind them again. Get edits. 50% of reviewers are good about using the revision tool, 50% are not. 

3. Reconcile edits (or the other option would be to send it out to 10-20 people sequentially). Ugh. This takes longer than the original draft.

4. Send draft to 1 or 2 people for final business edits. Reconcile.

5. Upload document into content management application.

6. Create a ticket in a project management/ticket tracking application for MarCom/editing group to do final edits on.

7. Receive notification of final draft available in content management system.

8. Create a ticket for the web team to publish it to the website. Wait.

9. Receive notification that it is published to the website.

9. Create an email marketing campaign to let the core audience know that it is available.

10. Send email. Hope it's opened.

If lucky, this process takes 6-8 weeks. If the content and writing are being outsourced to a third party, it takes even longer.

With social software, the process looks something like:

1. Write draft. Incorporate content from other sources but also make certain sections of the draft available for others to contribute directly.

2. Alert 10-20 editors that the document is ready for editing. Remind them to edit. Remind them again. (sorry that part won't change). They make edits directly to document.

3. Review edits - accept them or go back to the previous text or edit them.

4. Alert the final 1-2 people to review. They make edits directly.

5. Create an alert for MarCom/editing group to do final edits.

6. Receive alert that the final draft is complete.

7. Change permissions on file and publish to website directly. People subscribed to RSS feed will get notifications immediately.

This change to the fundamental process of content creation and management is not only a cost reduction in the number of applications needed but it is also a reduction in the workflow steps and people needed. In any business process that involves content creation and management, social software can dramatically reduce costs - and ensure that content is stored and categorized centrally...no more losing tons of data when employees leave.  It's almost enough to recommend to IT departments that they not give employees MSFT Office apps - although we are not there yet because of the need to share documents with external partners and customers.

Secondly, once content is published, social software allows the audience for the content to add tremendous value to the original content. Simply by adding ratings and reviews, the value of the content is doubled. Think of the Amazon model - the publishers content is useful but the ratings and reviews are even more so. In niche markets these ratings and reviews increase even more in value. Why don't most companies allow for this?

Then think about enabling customers to create content about your products or services. That probably doubles again the usefulness and value of the content to the end customer. ExpoTV is exploiting this by allowing people to upload video reviews of products - essentially taking that value away from the manufactures and distributors of the products themselves.

So your executives are afaid of negative reviews? Clearly they are happening anyway and if a product is truly that bad...shouldn't it be taken off the market anyway since it will undoubtadly lead to high service costs and a negative reflection on the brand...don't they want to know that? It's happening anyway, the support and brand costs are just hidden from sight and impossible to track if you don't encourage customers tell you directly.

Content. It's what drives business. Making it easier and cheaper to create - and then allowing customers to add to it - will be the way businesses win. Win repeat customers, win new customers, win loyalty, win evangelism. And in this day and age you can't affort to not make your customers into marketing partners.

Listening Well - It Involves More than Ears

I've seen a lot of people in my time who are very solicitous and who are patient as you speak to them but who are not great listeners. Why?  Because good listening is not just about hearing another voice - that is only one aspect of being a good listener.  The other - and from my perspective - the much more important skill is the ability to provide a safe harbor for someone to talk. 

What do I mean by that?  People will not share what they are really thinking unless they trust that the person with whom they are speaking will not use the information in ways that expose them or threaten them but who will also do what they can to help solve solve the problem.

I have had many a manager or colleague who would repeatedly express an interest in listening but when you expressed a problem would do any of the following:

• Publicly expose me and my concern to a group in a way that made me feel like I was causing problems and not competent to solve problems myself
• Reiterate the issue and tell me that they had full confidence that I could go fix the problem with the involved parties which left me thinking...if I thought it was so easy to do, I wouldn't have the problem in the first place  
• Bring up issues in a performance review discussion as a negative mark at some later date
• Look at me or respond judgmentally
• Cross their arms

All of which pretty much shut me down. Now over the course of my career I am sure that I've had problems that were wasting someone's time and probably very much my own fault. But here is the catch, once I had one of the above experiences there was no way I was going to take another problem to that individual. So they could hear everything I had to say and they never would have understood what was really going on with me because I wasn't going to say anything.  From their perspective, they may have thought they were spending a lot of their time listening...but they were listening to the sound of silence.

So, the biggest part of listening is that things go unsaid. Things go unsaid when others are not sure whether they have a supportive, non-judgmental environment in which to speak.

The result? It is not good enough to open your ears (or search for the name of your brand online) - you must actively solicit people's opinions and when they are negative or critical you have to hold back, not jump to conclusions, and explore with them what is causing those opinions...and not use it against them in a personal way.  In a world where things are speeding up, this is one area where we need to slow down or we won't actually hear anything. It's not about getting bigger ears, it's about getting a bigger heart.

The Social Challenge for 2009 - Scaling Relationships

Some of us have a hard enough time developing one or two strong personal relationships - let alone the multitude required for a large corporation. Mike Troiano rightly called me out a bit about scaling - businesses have to measure because there are so many different people involved with different priorities, values, and commitment levels.  And, indeed, I am not against measurement - you need some way to set goals and make sure you are progressing in that direction - I just think we need to step back more often then we do and evaluate what we are doing using our judgment.

Regardless, there is the issue of how can large organizations - and I mean the ones with tens of thousands of people - scale relationships? For example, if I am Sony and I want to ensure I have a highly trusted relationship with Ingram Micro - how do I evaluate the current state of the relationship and how do I improve it?  It involves thousands of people from both companies.  What companies have done, of course, is create processes and measurements to ensure consistency in interactions.  However that very consistency reduces the potential upside of the relationship as well as the downside.  You essentially manage to the lowest common denominator acceptable to you.  But you want to encourage the upside - the only option is to start loosening up the process and allowing some or all employees to go above and beyond (and maybe fail a few times too).The prospect is a bit scary since there is a huge revenue dependency between the two partners.

Social media tools have enabled better individual scalability.  So that helps in the one-to-many situations - an executive communicating with employees, an account manager sharing information with customer contacts, marketing communicating with a customer base.

But how do you scale many-to-many where all parties are communicating at the same time? Communities and social networks are part of the answer - but how do you keep individuals from going off deck with a small subgroup? I suppose you could shut off email and phone but that seems a bit excessive.  I think hiring on values as well as skill sets is a really large part of the picture (see the Zappos example) but for existing organizations you can't really re-invent yourself in that way very quickly. One piece of the answer is for corporations to better understand and articulate their values - for some reason this is almost as hard for companies as it is for individuals. By knowing themselves (i.e am the low cost, bare bones provider) they will know which relationships are most important to them...and it is not always the relationship with the customer.

I don't have the answer - any ideas?

I believe this is the big challenge for 2009.  How do you build a relationship-centric business at scale?

Just Do The Right Thing

I am getting tired of the conversation around optimizing leads and finding the calculated ROI of community and social media efforts. When did business leaders abandon the ability to just do the right thing? 

• The right thing by customers (if they have a question...why are you charging them for a calls?)
• The right thing by employees (give them credit, opportunity, and encouragement instead of treating them like disposable widgets)
• The right thing by partners (tell them about problems sooner rather than doing damage control later)

Many business decisions do not need calculated proof to know that they are right. In fact, I think models get us into more trouble then not....and the cost of all of that data collection and analysis is outstanding. It's cheaper to just do the right thing...most of you know what that is so? Just do the right thing. Stop the analysis, stop the wondering if you are right, stop the endless hand wringing, and more than anything stop the fear that you don't have 'proof' that something works. Just do the right thing.

Part of my passion around social media comes from wanting us as a business community to start treating each other like humans again rather than protagonists in a plot that can be compartmentalized as 'just business'. Turns out consumers would like to be treated like humans too. And maybe that is too much to hope for - there are a lot of people out there who believe that they can't win unless someone else loses - but that is not the environment in which I want to spend my life.

I think businesses have completely forgotten that at the end of the day they are just like my corner drycleaner who looks out for customers by looking over cloths, recommending sometimes that it is better to clean something by hand at home, knows most customers by name, rings you up if you have orphaned your clothes for too long, and feels a vested interest in participating in the community because he knows that the community is what makes his business successful.  And my drycleaner does not need a model to tell him to do any of those things.

And no, I am not entirely against tracking metrics - I just think we've used them as a cruch for so long that we have forgotten how to think for ourselves and use our judgement to solve problems. And sure, it is easier - you can blame the data if your data-driven decision somehow doesn't turn out well - but is that the best leadership we can hope for?

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How Can Communities Thrive in a Cynical Age?

The Advent and Christmas season is one where I think of my deceased father the most...he was a minister and for obvious reasons this was always a busy season.  It was also his least favorite.  He almost hated the celebration of Christmas - the gifts, the trees, the shopping.  He was actually pretty miserable to live with for most of December...and then, inexplicably, a gift would show up under the tree for me with a tag written in his highly formal script signed 'from Santa'. Clearly he was a bit conflicted but his real issue was that people didn't spend the time appreciating the meaning of the Christmas story and instead focused on the the selfish, superficial aspects.  Granted his ideal version of Christmas day was probably somewhat of a pious nightmare - sitting Puritanically on hard benches for hours contemplating what an innocent baby was trying to demonstrate to a world fraught with conflict and tension...

No one wants that - at least I don't - but he had a very important point. The world is a profoundly flawed place - there is war, starvation, conflict - but people have a huge capacity for good and so there is profound hope as well.  It is up to individuals to choose and it is a choice that we make every day - are we going to act as if there is hope or are we going to act on our fears?  Christmas is all about seeing the hope and the potential in a otherwise dark world.

Acting on hope, however, is not an easy task.  It assumes we've got to take the world and other people at face value - with all their flaws - and act on the assumption that the individual or organization we are dealing with will improve, because otherwise what's the point?  If we take the cynical view and assume that the other individual or organization will not improve, we are looking at a situation from a perspective of fear and it is paralyzing.  Religion then, is all about holding on to the faith that there is, indeed, hope for improvement. 

How does that relate to communities?  Well one, communities are all about forming ongoing relationships with people.  And people are hard to work with - not because they are necessarily difficult - but each person has different priorities and perspectives.  Communities require us to compromise our own priorities and perspectives so that the consensus can form and communities can make a difference.  As a society however, we have become more individually isolated, gotten used to having our way at all costs, and really don't like our decisions to be dependent on others.  We've become cynical and we lose our faith and trust in organizations very quickly.  We've replaced blind trust with blind cynicism.  That is a huge problem because no person or institution I know is perfect but all too often we are ready to simply pick up and move on if we run into issues, rather than dig in and try to help solve the problem.  I see this in myself and other customers all the time - I am incredibly impatient with poor customer service and I am still working on becoming a more patient person. Certainly the companies that I buy from are not actively trying to piss me off. Do they always do a good job in all aspects of their operations? No. But that makes them just like us...a bit flawed but usually trying to do the right thing given the resources they have available.

I don't know exactly where I am going with this but it's a time of year that I think about this topic a lot and this year I've been running into all sort of examples of people who feel entitled or ungrateful for other people and it's a hard year...we all need to give each other a break - and the benefit of the doubt that most people are not trying to sabotage us.  In that vein; go tell someone how much you appreciate their efforts, we're all doing the best that we can.

Personally, I'm quite thankful for my father's persistence in teaching me the lesson of hope & faith.  I don't go to church these days and I do occasionally think I could use a more regular reminder that I should act in faith that things will improve. My father's lesson was a strong one, however, and one that seems to become more important these days, not less. My father would be overjoyed to see someone of his faith finally make it to the White House, taking that message along with him. What can we do to help?

The Alignment Gap Between Organizational Structure & Organizational Priorities

Large companies have necessarily needed a functional structure in order to manage the vast number of people they employ. Somewhere it was decided that any one individual cannot be responsible for more than 7-10 direct reports...and consequently you get functional hierarchies.

The big issue? Whether functions are determined by job type(engineering, sales, etc.) or by market segment (consumer, channel, etc.), corporate priorities and initiatives typically cross function. That may not seem so bad, except that each functional head understands the priorities just a little bit differently. One function may see the number 1 priority as 10x more important than the number 2 priority while their colleague may see them as roughly equal in importance.  That has huge implications on how many and which resources get assigned to different initiatives.  Below is my simplistic graphic of this problem:

You can see where an organization may start to go horribly wrong.  Whatever initiative that is #2 may cause huge engineering and services issues because while marketing and sales ramped up investments...the company isn't staffed appropriately to deliver.  On the #3 priority, the company may be making huge investments in something but if marketing and sales are not also making investments, the initiative will fall flat and ultimately not succeed.  Yet many companies do not hire business owners for their initiatives and priorities (instead they tend to spend lots of money on consultants to try and fix the problem) and incentive structures typically reward functional heads for meeting objectives that are within their scope of control.

In the social media circle we talk a lot about how more open and transparent communication can help identify the gaps and issues but communities can't really solve the problem.  If anything they just put more pressure on understaffed resources to keep up with initiatives in other groups that may be much better staffed.

Let's take a bit of a radical view and say...why don't companies staff initiatives instead of functional groups? For example, a corporate initiative could be to increase customer satisfaction.  There are likely things in every functional area that need to be addressed.  Then maybe skill set based groups become more communities of practice and maybe groups that pool resources when individuals roll off of projects and get assigned new ones...and maybe that is how you also measure individual performance.  Those that always get snapped up for projects should be rewarded while those that are regularly returned to the pool get put on development plans.  This is more or less the way consulting firms work...why not other types of corporations?

My guess?  Most people don't like to leave their comfort zone. Instead of exciting, people prefer predictable.  The problem?  Very little is predictable anymore.  GM is near death's door, The Chicago Tribune has declared bankruptcy, and a handful of well-armed terrorists can create chaos for weeks in the world's largest cities.

I think initiative focused cross-functional teams would be an interesting way to approach this problem.  Hire pure resource managers to manage people who are 'on the beach' as we used to say in consulting and between initiatives.  In my mind that would give individuals one primary goal - for the length of the initiative (which could be multi-year if it involved expanding into a new market).  Communities of practice could then be set up - using social software - to help share skill-specific best practices across individuals.

Anyone else think that sounds like a good approach?