image from wikipedia

a friend and colleague asked me a question regarding some internal communications within our firm last week. during our conversation, she said, ‘i don’t know why [my team] won’t just ask everyone on yammer.’ i said it’s because on the internet, no one knows you’re a suit.

every day, in corporations all across the world, people go to work wearing a mask — sometimes more than one. like the billy joel song, they’re the faces of the stranger but we love to try them on. the marketing specialist. the associate. the senior vp of sales. but when you’re on the internet, no one can see that mask; all they can see are the contributions that you make. to put your ideas out in a public forum is to open yourself up to all kinds of criticism.

in business, you used to be able to hide behind your title. the senior tech said this is why we’re taking a certain approach, and that was the end of discussion because who would stand up to him? now the first-year analyst out of college can raise questions about, and disagree with, that approach. the person from accounting can share her thoughts on the marketing specialist’s ideas on the name of the redesigned newsletter. these enterprise 2.0 systems like yammer cause a flattening of the hierarchy and a cross-pollination of teams that we have never before seen in business.

and that scares the shit out of people.

but if we’re going to get the most out of our organizations — if we’re going to really excel in what we do — we’re going to have to become more agile and we’re going to have to look for solutions outside of our normal channels. each person has to pull on the same rope. the only way to really accomplish that is if we put down those masks, get over the fear, and go into work tomorrow as ourselves ready to work openly with each other.

i’m john scardino. i have a few ideas that i’d like to explore.

i hope i can explore them with you.

i got nothing.

after that failed, i sent a question out on our yammer network to my colleagues and friends asking the same question. roughly 2 minutes and 30 seconds later i had a colleague of mine forward along an example document with exactly everything i was looking for. this was a colleague whom i’d have never even known existed if it weren’t for social networking within the enterprise.

but here’s the kicker…

the enterprise system we’ve developed has cost the firm countless thousands of dollars (probably millions), meanwhile the yammer network we’re using is the free version — no cost at all to us. using this high-cost technology outfit provided me with no answers at all and was actually a time-suck when you look at it, meanwhile a free system available to anyone was able to connect the person who needed information with the person who had the information.

the moral of the story is this: business needs to rethink where it’s spending its money. high cost IT departments in organizations don’t have to be high cost anymore. there was once a time when machines could do things that we mere mortals couldn’t, and so we developed these new systems to supplant humans. the problem is that that paradigm has shifted.

the focus needs to not be on what the technology is capable of, but on what the technology enables us to do.

at the end of the day this change in focus is better, faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

not easier, but better.

image by Alvin K, flickr artist

here’s a simple science experiment:

count how many emails you get today from advertisements. also count the number of spam messages that get filtered into your junk email folder. in addition, count the number of emails you get that have attachments to them, especially large ones. then finally count how many emails you currently have across your folders that are unread.

now, you tell me if email is really a good tool to use or not.

monday morning was a morning like all the rest, for a little while at least. i woke up at my normal time — 6:40a — ate reese’s puffs for breakfast, and headed out the door to the office. (fear not; i did get showered, clothed, and brushed my teeth in between.) when i arrived at my desk and opened the screen on my laptop, that familiar “boop” from the internal speaker of my firm-issued lenovo thinkpad rang true just as it has every morning since 2009, and i quickly pulled up microsoft outlook to check my email.

as i scanned my inbox for unread items, i had an alarming feeling overwhelm me: “there’s not a single thing in here that i want to read.” that’s not to say that i don’t like my job — in fact, my current tasking is probably as rewarding as my current role has ever been and i’ve learned a great deal from it — but the emails clogging up my 675 megabytes of exchange server space really didn’t need to be there. i pondered for a moment: “how much of this is my own fault? how many of my emails are other people looking at right now thinking the same thing: ‘this is worthless’?” so right then and there i decided my goal for the week:

don’t send a single email.

one of my friends, astonished, asked, “…are you off all week?” nope. i just wanted to live more intelligently, so boom — i cured it with my brain. shortly after, my brother sends me an email about going to a phillies game in april and i promptly reply on my iphone. doh! i convince myself that was unfair, i mean… i just started this thing, so i pull a kramer, “alright. starting.. now!” and the rest of monday goes off without a hitch. one day in, this isn’t bad! i was able to coordinate what i had to do in work with some simple, more engaging, phone calls and face-to-face micro-meetings. any and all other communication happens via text message, yammer, twitter, facebook, and online forums.

tuesday comes along with its own challenges (namely the fact that it isn’t friday yet). now people are asking me for tangible things! ‘that file’ and ‘that sql statement’. woof! even still, with people asking for powerpoint presentations and txt files, i’m able to use our corporate enterprise 2.0 system — based on microsoft sharepoint — to upload and store files on our team site and verbally tell folks, or drop an instant message, about where to go in order to get to it. four phone calls, two uploads, a handful of face-to-face conversations, and a circumvention of the rule by asking a coworker to email one particular file for me instead (hey, i still didn’t send it.. delegation of duties ftw!) and i’m through my second day of the week. confidence grows. i can do this.

on wednesday, this article about reply-all storms from the wall street journal crosses my yammer feed (thanks, nathan!). i’m convinced now more than ever that what i’m doing isn’t just good for me, but good for the whole company. i also convince myself that being able to fly is probably the one superpower i’d really like to have if i could only have just the one. i spend the vast majority of my time at client site for the rest of the week where email isn’t really available to me in any normal capacity. the vast majority of my work continues to use shared network services, face-to-face, and telephone calls. my personal communications are strictly through facebook, micro-blogging, lunch with a friend and colleague at taco bell, text messaging, and xbox live.

and here, as i type this on sunday evening, i have yet to send a single email since the one i sent to my brother on monday morning. so to the question, “what’s it like to live life without email?” let me just answer with one word:

awesome.

in sum…

pros: it’s far more engaging to work with actual people and not an inbox; not having to worry about “how is this going to come across?” or “does this make sense?”; it actually takes less time to call someone than to email them; using shared resources and e2.0 platforms (a) keeps version control, (b) lets everyone connect, not just those folks on the to: line, (c) keeps everything organized.

cons: some information doesn’t need to be persistent but for a while. using a wiki or other 2.0 tool is overkill, and a phone call or face-to-face meetup doesn’t provide the kind of fall-back reference needed; i miss signing my emails “- dino”.

overall: i’m not saying that email is completely worthless, but it’s mostly worthless. there’s not much value you get from email that you can’t get from any other means. i won’t say that i’ll never send another email again, but i’m certainly going to keep moving forward with this new perspective on the ageless tool of the digital age: less is more. why don’t you join me? do what i did.. just try it out for a week.

image by setlasmon, flickr artist

i’m a new breed of employee and, believe it or not, there are a lot more like me. we’re all over the place, and the best news — for us anyway — is that there are more of us coming. and perhaps the first thing that we could care less about is the traditional corporate structure.

to us, it doesn’t really matter what your title says. it doesn’t matter how old you are, or where you come from, or even where you went to school. what we do care about is what value you bring to the table… and what kind of computer you use (mac, for the win!). it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been around or how new you might happen to be because good ideas are good ideas, no matter who has them. and that’s what we gravitate towards.

we don’t want someone who sits at a bigger desk to tell us what to do, and it’s not about a lack of respect for authority. for us, we just have a different idea of who actually is the ‘authority’. for many of us, that happens to be ourselves. we want to work on what we want to work on, and it’s because — on some level — we have an attachment to it. we’re passionate beings, and we like to express and explore that passion. we don’t want to just go through life checking boxes.

we care about what we do and how we do it. employees like us don’t want email and we don’t want telephones; we want facebook and twitter. we want to be mobile. we want our office and our information in our pocket because we want our work to be anywhere. board shorts on a beach? no problem. off-site meeting with a client? no problem. we also want to have a voice in the direction that our tribes take. but beyond having a voice, what we really care about most is actually being heard. we’re not all stupid.

we care just as much about giving information away as we care about consuming it. why should anything be strictly mine? or yours? or anyone’s? you may be a great analyst and do great things with information that is provided to you, but when have you ever given back to the community that provided that opportunity to you? because if there’s one thing you should know about us, it’s that we’re relentless.

we don’t think that we can have an impact on the world — we know that we can. so don’t try to censor us. don’t hold us back. don’t act like you know what’s best for us. don’t think for one moment your ideas are better than ours just because you’ve “been there, done that”. don’t expect the same things out of us because you’ve gotten it out of everyone else who has come before. obedience without question. satisfaction over scraps of success. sorry, but we’re not interested. not anymore.

i’m part of the new breed of employee. i’m a 2.0 in a world of 1.0. so whatever expectations you had for me, go ahead and throw them out the windows 95/98/2000/xp. maybe the reason you’re having such trouble with me is because you’re putting artificial boundaries on me. it’s time for a paradigm shift; dare i say it’s time for a revolution.

so don’t box me in.

i’m glad.

image by Reini68, flickr artist

when was the last time you had a good idea?  one of those eureka moments?

i remember back in college my roommate and i were discussing which of the honey bunches of oats ‘flavors’ we enjoyed the most.  after trying pretty much all of them, i told him with conviction that hbo with strawberries was my favorite.  i said:  ”the thing i love about it is how your milk turns strawberry-flavored afterwards.”

immediately i thought, ‘hey — they actually make that stuff!’ and i shouted out with such joy, “dude!  what if i make strawberry milk, and then pour that into my hbo with strawberries?  it’s double the strawberry!  how awesome would that be?!”

the very next time we went to the grocery store i bought some strawberry nesquik mix and put my theory to the test.  naturally it ended up being horrendous, but it was still a good idea at the time.

the reason i mention this is because good ideas (even the ones that fail) are almost always a product of some kind of external stimulation.  these ideas come to you through conversations, through listening, through watching other people.  this is why working in distributed teams causes such problems for so many.

this notion of “you have your job, i have my job, and we’ll call each other every tuesday and discuss the status of things,” doesn’t work.  it separates out the work being done from the actual creative process.  as leaders and managers, it’s important that we create environments that support the creative process rather than work against it.

it’s not always possible to have people in the same geography — i think we all know that.  business is global, and so too must your workforce be.  but we can certainly provide them with the tools they need to become better collaborators.  let your employees join and use social networks.  join them on those networks.  become part of the process yourself.  stop using email as your primary means of communicating work.  hold more video conferences and web meetings with visuals.

for those who are co-located, don’t put them in cubicle farms.  give them offices and more than enough spaces where they can come together with their thoughts, challenges, and proposals.  give them time in the day to work on something that’s entirely non-work related.  pro-bono work that they want to work on.  lessons learned from those efforts will carry over into the billable ones.

stop treating people as if they’re just cogs that can be placed anywhere.  find out who works well together and put them in the same space.  if it means moving someone from the 1st floor of your building to the 4th floor, then so be it.  throw those old “organizational standards” out the window because they don’t work anymore.

ideas do not occur in a bubble; so stop putting your employees in them.

image by dharmabumx, flickr artist

i was listening in on a social media community of practice presentation today that a colleague of mine was giving about social media in the enterprise and individual performance.

while i feel that my colleague has done some great work — and really took a rather large bite to create a conceptual model for promoting participation in online networks which is itself valiant — i think it’s important to make the distinction between participation, and adoption.  it’s a distinction that i feel is greatly overlooked.

mike’s model talked about awareness, self-efficacy, organizational trust, and this notion of perceived improvement potential all being drivers of participation.  and i think that’s wrong.  in fact, i think it’s exactly backwards.

you might think that i’m splitting hairs right now; toe-may-toe, toe-mah-to, right?  but participation and adoption do have rather different connotations despite the fact that often times you’ll hear those two words used interchangeably.  i think, however, that you’ll find one is far more desirable (and much harder to come by) than the other.  in fact, one leads to the other.

of the two, participation is far easier to accomplish.  it’s really as simple as griping and grinning… virtually of course.  when many people join online communities, they are timid.  they appear to be introverted whilst they become acclimated to their new digital surroundings.  i’ve written about introversion before (see here, and here), so i won’t go into much detail in this post — but it’s important to realize that some introverts just need a little push and others just a little time.  so in using social media — twitter, yammer, blogs, wikis, etc. — just reaching out with a “hello and welcome..” is all that person may need.

you can raise participation through this ‘welcome wagon’ as we call it on our yammer network, and from involving people in conversations.  ”hey, jesse, i see you’re on the ___ team.  do you have any experience in ___?”  if you ask someone a question directly, chances are they’ll answer.  even if they answer with a, “i’m sorry, but i don’t have an answer for you,” it’s still a step in the right direction.  with some follow up discussion, you can begin to elicit active participation from users.  but you also have to remember that there are other kinds of participation, too.

you can passively participate as well.  there are plenty of people who sign up for twitter or subscribe to blogs and never post or comment, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not there paying attention.  passive users can also derive value from the conversations which unfold and the information that’s shared.

adoption, however, is far more difficult to achieve.  the definition of “adopt” is to take by choice into a relationship.  people can participate here and there, or they can participate by doing nothing but listening.  for true adoption, though, a user must not just use the system or be part of the discussion — they have to push to better the system and take the discussion to more people.  true adoption happens when people take ownership of what’s going on.  it’s something that my colleague steve talks about all the time.  when you adopt something, you choose to make it your own.

i think participation is the catalyst for self-efficacy, organizational trust, and perceived improvement potential — not the other way around.  self-efficacy, organizational trust, and perceived improvement potential then help to lead to adoption.

that’s where i think the difference is between participation and adoption.  they’re not interchangeable; the one actually lays the foundation for the other.

i mean it.  i’m really fed up.

i can make bank transfers, and pay bills, and shop online from my cell phone.  why then can’t i access a file stored on a sharepoint installation from that same device?  why can’t i access the latest updates from members of my team on our project from an enterprise 2.0 solution?  why can’t i do it all pain free — just as i do my online banking (or my shopping at express)?  don’t tell me there are security concerns about accessing proprietary information outside of the corporate firewall.  i don’t want to hear it; it’s just an excuse.

i need knowledge when i need it — not where or when you want to allow me access to it.  i’m interfacing with clients all the time — hardly ever at my office — and i need to have the right information available to me so that i can help them make informed decisions.  i can’t be bothered to jump through hoops just to get that information.

i walk around with an iphone in my pocket all day, and i can hardly use it for more than pulling up a lightsaber, finding waldo, and making fart noises.  it’s unacceptable.

if you work in enterprise security, i’m holding you personally accountable.  for far too long you have lagged behind the curve when it comes to the rest of the technology world.

it’s time that you finally catch up.

i find email to be a burden to my work.

it’s the hammer in the tool box. the problem is, not every situation is a nail. sometimes you need a screwdriver, and other times you need a wrench. but we’re so dependent on email (i blame ms outlook for it) that we all try hammering in screws and bolts — even when we know it doesn’t work.

even though we have instant messaging, and even though we have enterprise 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs and more, we time and time again return to email.

i think part of the reason is because ms outlook isn’t a mail client anymore; it has become a platform. since people have it open all the time and communication is instant, we use it instead of IM. we send files using outlook instead of posting them to some other service (like sharepoint.. ugh). we schedule meetings through outlook. we look up phone numbers and office locations through outlook. we hold long conversations in outlook. we ask questions in outlook, and we distribute information in outlook.

how frustrating is it, knowing that the place where you keep answers to your questions about multivariate calculus modeling for enterprise decision support is the same place that you keep information about server downtime from the internal IT department and notes about leftover sandwiches from the breakfast meeting being in the kitchen on the 4th floor?  how can anyone find anything in that mess?  we waste more time cleaning, sorting, and deleting messages from our inboxes that have no business being there.  cleaning, sorting, and deleting messages just so that we can find what it is we’re actually looking for.

enterprise 2.0 systems need to be more than a collection of blogs, wikis, and other web 2.0 tools.  it seems to me the easiest way to push adoption is to provide not just the screwdriver, or the socket set (metric, please) — we need to provide the hammer.

we have to add messaging!  instant communication needs to be part of our e2.0 solutions.  we need to create an internal facebook, with messaging, chat, and status updates/content sharing (micro-blogging) all in the same platform.  we have to make it so that people can do their work — all their work — from within one internal platform.

all of our tools, hammers included, need to be in the same box.

image by syamastro, flickr artist

blog.  wiki.  ms excel file.  ms project plan.  ms sharepoint page.  basecamp project.

they’re all tools.  while people may prefer one tool over another, whichever tool it is will not take hold unless the culture there supports it.

i see a lot of proposed changes to current work streams and business processes fail because — even with support from leadership — the user base rejects those changes.  there could be a few reasons why:

• it’s not simple.  if the change is convoluted, adding extra steps to the workflow process or time to complete tasks, people are going to reject it – even if they agree in principle that the proposed new method is “right”
• they don’t understand it.  if you make a change that people don’t understand the reasoning behind, they will have a hard time accepting and implementing it.  #1 sign that you made boo-boos?  hearing employees say, “uh.. why are we doing this again?”
• it doesn’t fit.  if your changes contradict the way you do business, it’s only going to lead to confusion and frustration, and ultimately it will be abandoned.

if you’ve tried making changes to the way your team or organization does work in the past and failed, check the process again.  look at what you’re trying to do, and see what your people think about it.  when new tools don’t take hold, don’t discredit their use.

it’s the culture, stupid!

keep the tools and fix the culture.