“Bottom-Up Revolution”

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Steve Mays

From an opinion piece on Al-Jazeera, by Paul Rosenberg

Obama, however, is just one political figure, reflecting the more general state of US politics – particularly elite opinion and major economic interests. His ambivalence is, in this sense, an expression of America’s fading power. Obama’s belated attempts to play catch-up with the Arab Spring are but one facet of a more general loss of previous dominance.

And this from Wadah Khanfar, on the obsolecense aging Arab regimes:

This outstanding change, this historic moment, was totally lost on ageing governments that thought they were dealing with a bunch of kids who only needed to vent and then go home to their aimless lives. But they were wrong: because their ideas were old, their opinions were old, their minds were old, and their spirit was old. Ignorance can sometimes be a tool of destiny.

I’m finding Al-Jazeera a very credible and refreshing source for world news.

And then there’s this from a recent NYT story:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Reminds me of all those Stinger missles we gave the Taliban fighters to use against the Russkies.

“The Cultural Imperative For A Social Business”

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Steve Mays

That’s the title of a blog post by Maria Ogneva that has been stuck in my head for a week or so. It’s about how businesses and organizations communicate and share information. A topic of discussion in our company recently. Here are a few of my take-away’s from Maria’s post:

“Transparency and openness require the braveness of “opening up the kimono”, not when convenient, but all the time. It involves letting people know what’s happening and why, with advance notice, providing a channel to share feedback, and closing the feedback loop – in the open.”

I give us a B- on that one. We’d like to be there but aren’t quite.

“Knowledge hoarding is replaced by sharing. Traditionally, our educational systems have emphasized becoming a specialist. We have hoarded our knowledge in fear that if we shared what we knew, we will become more replaceable.”

Ouch. Been guilty of that myself. I suspect we still have pockets but by the very nature of hoarding, it’s difficult to know.

“Command and control mindset: Traditionally, corporations have been structured with tightly managed controls at the top, which were passed down through levels of management, down to the people who actually performed the work. Tasks to be done, as well as the processes by which these tasks had to be done, were mandated from the top.”

The C&C manager often has an “I-know-best-that’s-why-I’m-the-manager” mindset. Takes a lot of self-confidence to break free of this approach. But the command and control style of management be less and less effective in any event:

“Rigid hierarchies: Scarcity of information pre-Internet, combined with specialization, has contributed to knowledge hoarding. At times, this asymmetry of information, and not the right leadership skills, allowed people to rise up the corporate ladder. Hierarchies were developed to preserve this status quo. However, things are changing rapidly, and democratization of information is definitely putting the emphasis back on leadership style, and not access to information, as a competitive advantage.”

This is why I’m all in on the Network and shared information. It’s breaking down these 20th century approaches to business, communication and everything else.

If you manage a company or work at a company, you should take a few minutes to read this insightful post. I’ll let you know how things come out at our company.

Techies and Taciturns

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Steve Mays

Olivar Marks blogs about collaboration for ZDNet. He brings up an issue that I’ve been dealing with as I push for an enterprise social networking platform (Yammer) at our company.

“There seems to be a personality type that has a huge appetite for learning and using ever more frequent waves of new technology developments that is independent of any particular demographic, and who are eager to participate in group activities online or off.”

“These folks are often called “early adopters” and “techies” in companies and are leveraged in pilot try outs of new technologies. Their opposite –I call them the Taciturns (habitually reserved and uncommunicative)– are those who have limited interest (or competence and confidence) in collaborating, preferring instead to work solo and communicate on their own terms.”

Okay, I’m squarely in the first group. To the point of being annoying.

“Obviously some of the people who have created the workflows and body of knowledge inside a company through years of service resent the trivialization of their old fashioned ways of working, and some have been led to believe that they need to buck up their ideas and get with it on Twitter, micro/macro blogging, Facebook-in-the-enterprise and other forms of social engagement with their cohorts.”

…and I helped create some of those workflows and bodies of knowledge during the last quarter century but it’s time for some of them to go!

“The Taciturns of all ages generally speaking are laughing inwardly at all the teenage leadership stuff they hear being bandied about, and have often already decided they won’t be participating in any of that.”

What most managers -in my experience- really want is for every employee to immediately open, read and act on every email “from the top.” The notion of a social networking platform is less appealing because they now have to compete for attention with stuff (they consider) less important than theirs (usually everything).