The Social Organization

The Promise of The Social Organization

Women are different than men. Women can do the same work as men. Women do things differently. Everyone should be treated equally. The debate circles on and on... and I don't tend to add my commentary very often because it has always felt like a false choice - to either assume women and men are the same or to assume they are different. However a couple of really interesting recent articles have appeared - the most lengthy by Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic called Why Women Still Can't Have it All and a shorter one that hit closer to home by my friend Morra Arrons Mele in the New York Times called Here to Stay, and That's Good for Women. Stepping back, both of these articles are about a lot more than being working mothers - they are about a societal structure that is broken for the way we live today and THAT is what feuls the passion for the work that I do. I think the structure of work is hurting all of us, both individually and collectively.

Our current societal structures are designed with the following assumptions in mind:

1. We have to be together physically to get work done.
2. There is someone at home full-time to make sure dinner is made, dry cleaning gets picked up, kids are supervised after school and the rugs are vacuumed.
3. Children need the summer off to help tend the fields.
4. Children and adults need the training to do explicit, structured tasks.
5. Corporations sole responsibility is to earn a profit.
6. Scale (large organizations) are more productive than smaller ones.

It's been a long time since most of those assumptions rang true - our society has gone through some very dramatic shifts:

1. The Internet makes it dramatically easier to work together from different locations - and take advantage of talent wherever it is.
2. The women's movement and its legacy has insured that working women are not only common but it's as expected that women would work as for men. Most families have no one at home full time.
3. I have no fields near my house that need tending... and most other people don't either.
4. Explicit structured tasks are increasingly being done by machines. We now need people to use what is unique to humans - our creativity and empathy.
5. Both the positive and negative externalities of doing business are now easier to see - as is the reaction to them (Exxon & BP oil spills, BASF running zero waste plants, JC Penney supporting the GLBT community, etc) and organizations that don't take that into account will suffer for it.
6. Technology, infrastructure and market access is now being commoditized through cloud computing, new business models and social media.

Because of this disconnect, people are struggling to figure out how to make life and work fit together in a way that makes them feel sane and happy - and it's not easy.  It would not be too hyperbolic to say that I consider it my life's work to help people and organizations figure out how to fix this so that our organizations work for us again, not against us. After all, what is the purpose of an organization if it is not contributing to our well-being in a substantive way? The organizations (whether for profit or not) that best align with how we want to live will be the ones that get the best employees, the best support - and the best results.

What do we need?

1. Explicit support and encouragement by organizations to work anywhere, which includes the responsibility and accountability to work independently.
2. Choice in whether our work is 30-40-50-60-70 hours a week so we can fit our work to our life, not the other way around (with the understanding that we also choose our compensation levels accordingly) - and that working less does not result in working on less important and interesting tasks.
3. School schedules that more closely resemble work schedules and expectations... or work schedules that can be adjusted to school schedules (see above)
4. Radically different view of education, hiring and employee training.
5. Companies that start with a purpose and then find the business model(s) that support that purpose.
6. Organizations that operated as loosely coupled networks (see Dave Gray's new book The Connected Company for more info on this)

There are examples of many of the above practices throughout different organizations - I am optimistic that we are beginning to see how this new organization is structured and operates. Look at Giff Gaff, Whole Foods, Amazon, WL Gore for examples. It's happening and those that understand the power in these new models have no particular need to share their lessons... but the rest of the world would be wise to work on catching up.

Communities - The New Strategic Imperative

By now most of us have a rough understanding of Moore's Law and the exponentially increase in the processing power of technology:

While this increase in technical productivity has been celebrated liberally over the years and has generated huge amonts of value and wealth, it has changed the cost structure of businesses in ways that put increasing amonts of stress on people. Unfortunately human cranial capacity does not evolve quite so fast - changing over millions of years, not hundreds:

What does that have to do with social media?  Well, networked communication channels have existed for quite a while but there usage was limited - IRC chats were typically frequented by the more technically inclined, for example. But as organizations have applied technology and their operational speed has increased, humans - not technology & tools - became the biggest limitation to innovation and productivity. With that change, individuals have become more and more stressed because their processing capacity has not evolved. My hypothesis is that social media took off when it did in large part due to the strain being put on individuals to keep up with the pace of technological change. Social media has created an immense improvement in the speed of which individuals can share information and make decisions. This is great as it reduces some of the stress on the individuals in the system.

The problem? Technical processing power will continue to increase and once everyone is social tool-enabled they will end up in the same spot where they were before - as the biggest limitation to operational speed. What then? Humans cannot go faster and faster without breaking the quality of their decision-making and judgement. So while social communications channels will persist, their value to the organizational system will plateau. For those most connected now, they are the canaries in the coal mines - completely overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them from a myriad of communication channels.

This leads me to the conclusion that a strategy of faster will no longer be effective and, in fact, it will eventually lead you to crash and burn. What humans need and what will give an organizational competitive differentiation is the time and space to build quality products and services that are rewarded with higher margins. The way to acheive that time and space for people to do their best work is through highly trusting relationships with customers - and it is the only way. Customers must trust that by giving your company time to build a quality product or effectively support them, they will be better served.

That has some pretty broad implications. It means that to win, organizations will have to:

• Focus on building relationships first, rather than focus on the products and services first
• Educate and expose customers on internal processes so they understand and have realistic expectations of delivery
• Build in boundaries that allow individuals to slow down and focus
• Build trusted relationships with employees such that they not only don't feel pressure to go faster but are incented to make sure they are thorough and inclusive in their work

Communities are one of the few ways to scale some aspects of relationship development and building. Those companies who are ready for this next phase of operational effectiveness are busy investing in relationships today and not worrying quite as much about the short term ROI.  Those organizations too focused on the short term, transactional ROI of social media may find that they missed the boat as social media effectiveness flattens because their customers and prospects are off building deep, rich relationships elsewhere and, at the end of the day, those customers and prospects only have room for a limited number of those relationships.

It's time to fundamentally rethink how value is assessed, created and distributed and how we think about our competitive landscape.

Want to hear more about this from me? I'll be presenting these and other thoughts at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on Tuesday, June 21st in Boston.

What do you think? Are you personally feeling stressed? Do you think your organization wants to keep its foot on the gas to the exclusion of quality? Which companies have always done this relationship piece well and have they prospered?

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Vision of The Social Organization

We have a pretty clear picture of what a social organization looks like on the outside - marketing and sales becomes a pull rather than a push discipline and customers are much more involved throughout the customer lifecycle. But what does this new organization look and feel like on the inside? There are not many discussions of how employment and management structures change to become more agile.

There is more agreement on the issues:

• Slow moving, rigid organizations do not adapt to increasingly fast moving markets.
• Siloed information within organizations creates huge redundancy issues and makes efficiency difficult.
• It is quite challenging to hire individuals that can operate in large inefficient organizations and drive innovation or think differently and therefore organizations lack the 'best and the brightest' talent.
• Certain kinds of talent, particularly in the area of collaboration, are poorly identified and rewarded.
• Middle management is incented to protect their turf and hoard information leading to archaic corporate politics and huge inefficiency for the organization.
• The hiring and layoff cycles have created immense distrust of employers.
• Employees are increasingly stressed due to unease about their job stability, the deluge of information, and increasing responsibility to fund their own health insurance and retirement.
• Families with two working parents are strained for time. Families with one working parent are increasingly uneasy about the risk of one paycheck. Single adults are increasingly stressed because they are viewed as the employees most ready to work long hours.
• More and more individuals want to be in control of their own work life since the perceived risk of working for a large organization is not significantly lower (and may be greater) than the risk working for themselves.

Most organizations have a long way to go to be places that employees are clamoring to work for but in the new communications environment that clamoring employee enthusiasm will drive revenues and market share if it exists. That employee enthusiasm also drives alignment with corporate values and messaging, increases opportunities because all employees are advocates, an decreases risks because employees feel more individual responsible for protecting the interests of the organization.

So what might this organizational nirvana look like?

Employment becomes a cross between a long-term commitment and free-agency: The organization provides employee overhead (benefits) in exchange for a commitment to work a minimum number of hours on organizational projects.

Managers are either focused on professional development or projects: Managers no longer 'own' a functional piece of the business but either manage a group of employees to help them choose projects and navigate their career or they manage projects.

Employees and Project Managers Negotiate Work Commitments: Employees are free to self-commit to projects for which they are interested and have time. Project managers define project roles, time needed, and associated pay and are responsible for recruiting team members and managing the project to completion. Employees can work as little (as long as the reach the minimum required for employment) or as much as they feel they are able to at that time. Project managers can solicit specific employees or change the pay to get employee commitment. This has the side affect of paying more, not less, for tedious or unappealing jobs.

Employees Manage Their Schedules. If an employee has a family member with an illness and needs to work the minimum required, they choose their project commitments accordingly. If on the other hand, they have time and want more hours to maximize their income, they can choose a heavy schedule.

Employees define themselves by skill sets, attributes, and experience based on a published taxonomy so that project managers can find and solicit team members.

360 Degree Reviews. Everyone on a project gets to review the performance of everyone else, with some templates and guidelines to do so based on organizational values and goals.

Executive Tasks Are Earned. Based on the successful completion of projects that represent bigger and bigger pieces of business, executives earn the right to budget or more loosely defined (risky/innovative) projects. Some executives will continue to select projects with bigger budgets and some executives will likely continue to choose more innovative projects, depending on their interests.

A Senior Executive Team Is Still Necessary. The C-Suite will still set the overall strategic direction and priorities for the organization - with plenty of input. The C-Suite will also oversee the initiation of projects, the arbitration of issues between teams, and they will ensure gaps are being addressed.

All Projects Are Vetted, Prioritized, Budgeted and Scheduled. Any employee or customer can initiate a project but there are various committees, depending on the size and purpose of the project, that vets and schedules them. These committees are filled with project managers that rotate on and off of them, based on the interest of the project manager themselves in participating.

Customers Can Be Project Team Members. If a customer is particularly invested in a particular project and have the appropriate skills, they are incorporated into projects.

The overhead of organizing in this way has been too high in the past, particularly for very large organizations. However, technology - both enterprise functional software as well as networked communications software - has made the overhead of managing this complexity much easier.  Models similar to this exist in the professional service world - the big management consulting, marketing, and accounting firms. I think it's time to test it out in more traditional organizations as well.

Generally we need to get away from the parental model of the organization to one that views employees as partners and both treats them and expects them to act like adult peers. This will require an adjustment for many employees as well - there are many people who like the easiness of just being told what to do but that makes them sub-performing employees which organizations can no longer aford if they want to compete globally.

This model also introduces new issues and risks - what are some of these issues in your mind?

Update: One emerging model that I really love is uTest - for more on their business model innovations, built around community, read their latest update here.

The Inextricable Link Between Social Media and Enterprise 2.0

Social media and enterprise 2.0 are largely thought of separately these days, in large part because social media primarily affects communications and relationships with constituent groups outside of the organization and enterprise 2.0 addresses collaboration and innovation behind the firewall. In reality, organizations will find that by doing one they must address the other. Why? Social technologies significantly reduce the cost of content creation, distribution and discovery, thereby significantly increasing the speed of information and value transfer. If implemented on one side of the corporate firewall but not the other, it creates an imbalance that grows quickly, increasing tension and strain felt in other parts of the organization.

In most cases, the information environment outside the organization is changing far more rapidly than the information environment internally. Customers, partners, prospects, and employees can find, access, and share information in a way that corporate infrastructure, security, culture, and policies inhibit. Organizations are having a hard time keeping up with - never mind responding to or taking advantage of - these new environments. As organization do adapt, the external environment is continuing to speed up and become more efficient at arbitraging information and value. In a particular market that means the advantages go to people and organizations that are first to see the opportunity.

If as an organization, you have built a robust social media ecosystem for marketing and customer support, but have ignored applying social and networked communications technology internally, new opportunities will be found quickly in the market only to hit a brick wall once introduced internally. On the flip side, if you've applied internal social technologies that enable rapid innovation and collaboration, but you have no external channels by which to inform your market and gather feedback rapidly, that innovation will have limited value to the organization.

Those companies that have been at this a little longer than others realize this and we are starting to see how radically it is affecting their entire enterprise - Dell, SAP, EMC, CSC and many others now understand that this is not about a Facebook or blogging strategy, it's about increasing the speed of business and increasing their competitive advantage.

It's no longer a question of if, but when. Is your organization the one hitting the gas pedal or are you still riding the brakes?

This post is cross-posted from The Community Roundtable blog.

Social Media ROI - Seeing the Forest for the Trees

There has been a lot of discussion about social media ROI lately - everyone is pushing very hard to figure out how it can be used to make money or reduce costs. Fundamentally we need to start any investment initiative with the goal of making more or spending less so the ROI conversation is very important. However, as an analyst I often had to chuckle because we hear very little from the companies making a lot of money (with high margins) off of social media and online communitities - companies like The Knot, Match.com, and UTest. Why? Those who have figured out the puzzle have no particular need to share their secrets and in most of the examples I know of they are market disruptors, not established brands.

The other reason I shake my head is that the ROI discussion doesn't include the discussion of time frame often enough and that is where the real challenge for companies lie.  In most business use cases that social tools are applied to, the revenue or cost impact is not returned directly. Instead social initiatives require constant investment for a period of time before the returns accumulate.  When they do they can grow quite quickly but if the organization does not understand the investment period required, they can easily cause themselves to fail by being too anxious for the returns to manifest. And this aspect of social media is really, really hard for large organizations to manage, particularly in the marketing and customer support functions. In large part, the business processes, infrastructure, and resources of marketing and support are not set up to support initiatives that have off-set returns. To get around that hurdle, outsourcing seems to be a good choice but that often means a time-bound project where both companies and their vendors push for returns in a relatively short period of time which can result in a long-term negative impact on building a community of advocates.

ROI is important but if the dynamics of social initiatives and how they produce results are not well understood it is quite easy to force failure before you give projects the space and time they need to succeed.

As an analyst who is now running my own business I have been fascinated by how large the marketing ROI really is when social media tools are used effectively but it has also reinforced the fact that the returns are slow to ramp at first and accelerate over time. Judging the results too early would have definitely made the investment look like a failure. 

The Economic Value of Communities

Every time a customer submits a question or answers a question in a support forum they are creating value for an enterprise. Every time an influencer with no direct economic ties to an organization, mentions a product to someone they are creating value for the enterprise. Every day, for large enterprises, there are millions of very small pieces of value created. However, in most cases these little pieces of value are lost to the winds of time because they cannot be captured, centralized, and organized for re-use. Online communities are part of the way to address this knowledge capture and distribution so that the value already being created can be extended and shared with more people.

Historically, these little bits of value were not formally recognized by organizations because the transaction cost of finding, capturing, organizing, and distributing these small bits of value was much higher than the value of the bit of information itself. The Internet, particularly with the addition of social networks, has drastically changes the cost of information discovery, capture, and distribution making it possible for smaller and smaller bits of value to be used in an economically viable way. And while each bit is not worth much on its own, collectively this value creation can fundamentally shift the cost of sales for an organization by creating marketing, sales, product, and support documentation faster and more accurately than the enterprise itself can.

The big trick in all of this, of course, is discovering the small bits of value, aggregating them and incenting those who are likely to continue to add value to make it even easier/cheaper for you by bringing them to both outposts and central locations where the enterprise can more easily collect, manage and distribute the information. That is not easy to do unless there is some value created to attract those individuals to your outposts or your home on the web. The enterprise has to provide some value freely to attract whose who will create even more value. Once this flywheel has started, the organization can shift into more of a curation than a value creation mode because participants will create value for each other. This is the essence of online communities. Communities are a constant process of its members creating and using value.

So what does this mean for enterprises in terms of their social strategy? I like to think of it in economic terms and it is helpful to segment the various audiences of an enterprise and identify those segments by thinking about the ratio of value consumption to value creation. The closer that ratio is to 1:1 (for example, employees), the closer tied to the enterprise they need to be so that all of their value creation is captured and used. As you address audiences less connected to the organization - leads or the general public - the value proposition to capture and distribute value becomes weaker and the tactics to do that necessarily are less centrally integrated with the core business. The implications are that employee and customer communities will produce the most value back to the organization but the cost to the organization will also be higher than for other groups. This is interestingly, however, not how many enterprises get started with social media and online community initiatives because, while the value proposition is higher, the cost and complexity is also quite a bit higher. So many organizations start by aggregating mentions of their brand by the general public (social listening) and using that for insight and public relationships management. This is a great way to dip the enterprise toe in the water, so to speak but it is also The Shallows, or the least valuable bits of information for the enterprise to collect and often not worth re-distribution. It has limited impact on the fundamental value structure of the enterprise (although not engaging in this way has some direct risks for public companies whose stock has been affected by public outcries).

The opportunity - and the appeal - of online communities is not that they make everyone feel better about their relationship with an organization, although that is a nice side affect, it is that they contribute tangible economic leverage back to an organization. For companies that figure this out, they will have significant advantages in their markets but the process of building a robust and integrated enterprise ecosystem is disruptive, expensive, and challenging - and many enterprises who launch discrete support forums may not always realize that they have put one foot down on the road to changing the way the organization thinks about its value chain.

If you would like to learn more about developing and creating communities, download our report The State of Community Management or consider joining The Community Roundtable - we would love to have you. More about membership can be found here.  This post is cross-posted from The Community Roundtable blog. 

How Social Software Could Stall Social Business Evolution

It's funny, my background is in technology and I really geek out about what technology can do but I don't talk a lot about technology explicitly on this blog. Why? It's not the *most* interesting part of the value chain. What people and organizations DO with software and the implications it has are far more interesting to me and have a far larger impact on business outcomes.  This is particularly true of social software because it is not something you can force people to use - or at least use well... I suppose there is some crazy company out there who could mandate that people update their status 5 times a day but you can guess what the results of that would be - a lot of crappy updates.

Danah Boyd just wrote an excellent post about why the Facebook privacy issues are such a problem. Like many of the issues that result from social technologies, the problems have little to do with the technology itself - it is about how the technology is used, configured, and communicated to its users. The Facebook privacy issues are frankly why I've always been a bigger fan of Twitter - with Twitter my contract with them is relatively clear - everything is public.  Even Twitter, however, has added new functionality and not communicated very clearly what the impact is. For example, they added location identification to tweets which has some big implications.  This issue of clarity for the end user about what they are doing and with whom they are sharing their information (including search spiders) is enormous - and not only for public social networks - it is one of the biggest issues that could stimy progress with enterprise social applications as well.

In the enterprise, the more one person is responsible for, the more constituencies they interact with on a regular basis and any good executive adapts their communication tone, content, and style to the audience - and in fact has legal responsibilities for doing so in some cases.  Some in technology circles would call foul on this and say that the communication lacks transparency but that ignores common sense and reality.  In reality if you are working on business plans with a group of other managers, it would be foolish to share half-baked ideas with everyone because everyone may not be paying attention when the final plans come out thus much communication would add to, not eliminate, confusion.  There are reasons that not everyone in the company gets invited to every meeting and if you don't offer people some measure of protection from exposure, they will not share their real opinions at all which carries with it huge business risks because that is, in fact, the way you negotiate and drive alignment. 

Social technology companies - if they ignore the reality of the decision-making process - risk the very potential of their market to flourish.  There must be ways for everyone to share information judiciously and with different groups. The flip side is that, yes, most enterprises are *too* locked down about how information is shared and the ease of information distribution and access. However, getting to a more fluid information environment is not fundamentally a technology problem - it is a cultural and management problem.  To effectively change culture and management, users cannot feel duped into sharing more than they wish - they must be made comfortable that they understand and control how they are sharing information and then get encouraged and supported when they choose to be more open. This is both a technology and a management challenge.  The UX of the software being used must be very clear to the user and the management culture must encourage and support people when they share.  The technology itself is necessary but not sufficient to make this change and it is the reason the debate over whether 'social business' is about technology or about management exists. 

The upshot - understand and think deeply about the UX (user experience) of the software being presented to your users.  Technology can obfuscate its mechanics pretty easily which can result in more sharing and that may, in the short term, look like a success but may have a high likelihood of backfiring if users are confused about how it works or worse - they get burned for using it because they didn't understand how it worked.  The UI/UX should not be an afterthought and it is not a insignificant challenge, especially for enterprise software groups that have not typically included UX issues as a major factor in purchasing/RFPs in the past (because with transactional systems it has been less important).  Along with finding a software experience that works, invest in training so that everyone is encouraged to use the application appropriately and when people mis-step, they are gently redirected vs. punished (whether by management or by other users).

Assessing the social dynamics of how people share information within your culture is the first step toward creating a more 'social' organization. Deploying software and cultural change that encourages individuals - in a relatively comfortable way - to take the next step will only be successful if it's understood how far the culture can be pushed before it will shut down.

Keeping Social Initiatives Simple

Part of the reason social media and software has taken off is its simplicity.  Twitter was about the simplest conversation interface possible. People contact organizations on their blogs, Facebook Pages, and Twitter because the existing mechanisms are too complex and have been so over-engineered that they are no longer humane (i.e. 'dial 5 for account information').  This has led me to worry about social methods becoming too BPMized (business process management) - because if it does, it likely becomes no better than the broken process it replaced. I've often asked people to think about why @ComcastCares is so popular (I am a big fan BTW). It's because, in general, existing support channels at Comcast are so bad.  If existing support procedures worked well for customers, they would not need to seek out support on Twitter.  All of us working in the 'social' space need to guard against over-complication for this reason.

Given that thinking, a recent blog post by Clay Shirky The Collapse of Complex Business Models really hit me hard. We are driven to increasing complexity yet that is the very thing that gets in the way of the value over time.  I've noticed this with both blogging and Twitter - they were both very, very simple when I started. Over time they have gotten very complex with plug-ins, application ecosystems, feeds, aggregation points, etc.  They are far more intimidating to use for people starting out today then they were when I started.  In the intervening time I've seen things like the large decline in teen blogging. Is it just that they have different tools like Facebook to use or has the complexity of blogging outstripped their interest and ability?

For those of us investigating the use of social technologies and techniques in a business context, it is worth giving a lot of thought to complexity. Simplicity is what is attractive and increases participation but our organizational cultures and structures often pull us toward complexity so that our efforts mesh better with existing processes. We often add complexity at our peril.

The Social Organization & Womenomics

I read two interesting articles in The Economist over the holiday break - "We Did It" and "Womenomics".  In some ways these articles covered some old ground; women are outpacing men in education and now in employment rates. There is even research to indicate that companies with more women in senior management positions are more profitable. Yet, women still make up a very small fraction of corporate and organizational leadership... it begs a lot of questions.

What the articles did address that I found more interesting is how societies are dealing with having women share equally in the working world. As it turns out - the U.S. is not dealing with the social implications of this very well at all. There are very few structural accommodations for all the things that women used to do when they stayed home: child care, elder care, food preparation, community management, house keeping, etc.  Sure we can pay for all of those things but if families do, most will spend more than one person's salary to do so... so only the richest can afford to fully staff their personal/family needs.  What happens instead?  We do laundry at 11pm, we frantically reschedule business meetings when children get sick and can't go to daycare, we trust strangers with keys to our homes so they they are somewhat clean, we eat crap, and we are all very stressed.  I don't think this is a women's issue any more.  Most of the people in my generation are strung out.  Looking at national demographic data we are also getting fatter, experiencing a rise in childhood mental issues, don't know our neighbors, and have faltering real-world community institutions...

I don't know about the rest of Gen X but I'm a little bothered by being hung out to dry and left to figure out how to deal with all of these issues for myself. My peers have handled this in a variety of ways:

• One person drops out of the workforce or significantly changes their career path when children arrive
• Many people stay single and bury themselves in jobs that take 50+ hours of their time (not sure if this is the chicken or the egg)
• Couples don't have children
• Couples limit themselves to one child because day-care and logistics are simply too hard to deal with otherwise
• Couples hire nannies and both have high powered jobs to support that
• Couples try to juggle two average jobs with daycare
• One parent typically finds a watered-down part-time position to try and keep one foot in the adult and working while spending some time with their children
• One member of the couple 'consults' and is left to a vagaries and loneliness of working alone.
• People are forced to put parents in nursing home or get 24-hour care because they can't live on their own but need someone around more than in the evenings

I know a few exceptional women who simply gave up interesting and challenging careers because they wanted a family but found the trade-offs too much to keep their careers.  Rather than take a dreary part-time job that offered no intellectual challenge or take on the unstable world of part-time consulting, they gave up work entirely. Personally I worked at a management consulting firm in my 20s and I loved the colleagues and the job - and they were going to pay for me to go to business school in exchange for returning there to work. From a career perspective, what could be better?  But I could not possibly see a future where I had to travel 4 days a week, every week. I had the opportunity to get into product management which has a less drastic lifestyle associated with it, so I choose that path. I don't regret that now - I learned a hell of a lot which is very handy now - but it definitely made my career bumpier.

Now I don't have children but my husband and I both work a lot and even without children I'm having a hard time juggling food shopping/cooking, laundry, cleaning, home maintenance, doctor's visits, caring for sick parents, etc. This situation frustrates me, makes me sad, and makes me think of all the amazing skills and experience that organizations are leaving on the table... simply because they cannot figure out how to create positions for people that don't look like what they always have.

For me this is a larger issue than figuring it out for myself - I can do that... it's annoying and I'll make some mistakes but I'll stumble along. However, this is an issue at the heart of being a 'social' organization.  Being 'social' means accommodating variety - including a variety of employee needs.  And it's not just because that is the right thing for the people who work in organizations - it's because people will give their right arm in commitment back to the organizations that give them interesting, challenging work to do in a structure that also allows them to have some semblance of personal sanity.  I'm betting the commitment that results will drive profitability improvements.

There's a lot of talk about how 'social' is transforming customer support and 2010 is the age of customer service... I don't disagree but until employees feel like they have some stability and sanity, there is only so far they are going to go to serve the organization's customer. 

What if organizations had a variety of positions at all levels (yes, executive too) - some of which were 20 hours a week, some 30, some 40, some 50, and some 60... it would not only allow people to decide how many hours they could work it would recognize those that now regularly spend over 40 hours a week working that are somehow just 'expected' to without necessarily getting commensurate recognition for doing so.  What if there were campuses for large and small organizations that had centralized and at-cost day care and elder care?  Some big companies do this today but it is very inconsistent; small & medium size companies only very sporadically offer these types of services.  More often than not, companies rent office space in vast complexes interspersed with parking lots - without any additional services to be had. I bet however, it would be a real competitive differentiator to either offer services as a company or locate in a complex that has a day care, elder care, dry cleaner, gym, grocery store, etc. (office park developers... are you listening?!?) I know a company that offered me challenging work with flexibility and easy to use/economical services would keep me much longer than any of my other employers have.

If you are in the business of figuring out how to make your organization more social and you don't have this issue on your list of things to address... it's time to start thinking about it.

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?