Organisational change

In most management practices, we only take into account what's visible. We address the problem at hand. However, what's not visible is often much more important since it will guide us to the real opportunity for relevant change.

With Enterprise 2.0, we are trying to solve some of the problems of today's business organisations. However, we must not forget that our business environment is rapidly evolving and therefore, we might be solving the problems of the past instead of those of the future.

Implementing change in an organisation is difficult, very difficult. There are numerous reasons or excuses for failure. However, the primary reason for failure is choosing the wrong destination.

Gartner research analysts recently convened to discuss the changing nature of work and table some predictions for the coming decade. Their consensus view was that chaotic, distributed and ad-hoc teams of people, along with blurred organizational boundaries, would become the norm for most modes of work.

Traditional businesses are struggling to recover from the economic downturn. They'll need to shift their focus from profits to authentic social engagement to have meaningful impact in the world.

I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

After 15+ years of deploying more and more tools, we need to ask ourselves - why haven't organizations realized the level of breakthrough collaboration necessary for them to excel - or in some cases, survive? It's not that the industry has not had any "wins" with collaboration strategies but success always seems to be stubbornly limited to certain groups or business units. Improving collaboration, it seems, has become an "intractable opportunity.

Collaboration is the mantra of the Enterprise 2.0 movement, but organisational boundaries complicate adoption and progress. Therefore, we need someone who takes a holistic view of what is needed to get employees to work across silos. Good idea?

At Tianjin, I was delighted to come across the thought provoking ideas of Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO. I'd like to share with you here a brief video in which Tim explores why enabling intrapreneurship is often considered the Holy Grail of large organisations and offers some thoughts on what they need to do to encourage a higher level of new ideas.

In the social enterprise debate, we always talk about collaboration, about connecting individuals. However, connecting more people as such should not be an objective. The thing that really matters is connecting the right people, which implies disconnecting from the wrong ones.

Facebook and Twitter don't have the power to change the world, says notable author Malcom Gladwell, whose book "The Tipping Point" detailed how little things can make a big difference. He made this controversial, counter-intuitive argument via an article in published in The New Yorker titled "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Twittered."

In our last post, we discussed cloud computing, one of the building blocks of the digital infrastructure that is driving the changes described by the Big Shift. This time we explore a second building block, social software.

The disconnectedness of people and information in today's enterprises is often the unfortunate by-product of a relentless drive for more growth, expansion, cost reduction and unnecessary control. However, disconnectedness as such is not a bad thing. Moreover, future enterprises should be intentionally designed for disconnectedness.

I'm a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business. If there's a better recipe for creating prosperity I haven't seen it.

Today's enterprises are increasingly facing challenges of rapid change, hyper-competition and complexity. Old methods and structures can no longer support the agility that is needed. Time for a radical management makeover?

What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are highly adaptable, endlessly inventive and truly inspiring? Why not indeed. That's the goal that lies at the heart of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX).

"You can smell the fresh paint as companies the world over complete their post-recession overhauls. Few business organizations, functions, and processes have escaped this rethink, which is meant to fortify organizations before the next downturn comes At the risk of stirring a hornet's nest, I'd like to ask one question: How many of us CEOs included, as part of the rethink, changes to the CEO's role and responsibilities? "

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward. With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth. Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.