Something is happening that has the potential to fundamentally reshape the way that business is done. For several years, corporate loyalty has been in retreat. Downsizing and the relentless pressure to do more with less have made it hard to love many corporations. Yet the emergence of web logs or blogs could turn the corporate world upside down in ways that few people understand.
While we are hearing about corporations successfully using blogs as a means of external communication such as Robert Scoble at Microsoft and Jonathan Schwartz at Sun, few people are talking about the potential for blogs to help corporations get their job done more efficiently. Even fewer are talking about blogs enabling some fundamental shifts in corporate culture.
“Blood believes in rules (for blogs). The companies that have them are typically on the cutting edge of technology, and in a growing number of cases they are not only permitting blogs, but encouraging them as a sort of homegrown marketing tool.”
“Sun Microsystems Inc. encourages employees to blog on company time and within company space, then posts the blogs on a dedicated site.”
Free Expression Can Be Costly When Bloggers Bad-Mouth Jobs
Washington Post, Friday, February 11, 2005; Page A01, By Amy Joyce
From my view point and that of others, we desperately need some changes in our corporations, or our competitive edge will be gone. The revolution in information sharing that is heading towards us is just what we need to turn upside down the corporate institution that is beginning to show some strain.
“Today, it (the corporation) is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today's dominant institution. But history humbles dominant institutions. All have been crushed, belittled or absorbed into some new order. The corporation is unlikely to be the first to defy history.”
The Corporation, A film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbot & Joel Bakan
There are three little acknowledged problems that are having a huge impact on today's large companies.
- Many first line managers are overwhelmed with information. Finding the right piece of information often means the difference between a happy customer and losing a customer. Often that information may be buried in six months of e-mail which often accumulates at the rate of over one hundred messages a day.
- The people in companies who actually need to get things done are starved for the right information.
- The work forces of today are ineffectively utilized because of the typical corporate structure which focuses on top down communication with little or no effective communication going from the bottom to the top.
Corporations try a number of things to mitigate these problems. Unfortunately the solutions being adopted are lagging well behind the revolutionary technologies that have the potential to fundamentally change the communication equation instead of just putting in place a fix based on outdated views of the way things need to work.
E-mail as almost anyone in a corporation will tell you has become a mission critical application. Yet email is a terrible way to communicate to groups. Remember the days when most people only received one or two e-mails every twenty-four hours? Now that you receive fifty times that many on any given day, how easy is it to lose an email from the boss in the ever-growing inbox? How easy is it to find one particular email when you need to review a corporate policy a few weeks down the road? Even with sophisticated search technology like that provided by Gmail, finding the right email at the right time is a huge challenge.
Of course, many companies handle this by creating internal websites. Some of these web sites are good, but they tend to showcase information that, though important, is rarely critical to getting daily work done.
For five years I had an internal website just for my sales team. It contained information more important to performance of our job than was on our internal corporate website. It had presentations that we could refer back to as needed. It began as an easily referenced history of our plans, successes, and challenges.
I like to think as it evolved, it became a good place to communicate with people and to centralize information that might be needed. As I added external links, it became something of a customized portal for our team which meant that people were more likely to go there and see what was posted. It certainly helped in bringing new hires up to speed.
It was a much more permanent way to get across a philosophy of sales than a monthly or weekly e-mail to the team and was a good way to reinforce messages that did go out in e-mails.
I was lucky that no one above me paid attention to my website so I did not have to get corporate approval to publish the information. I also had the skills to create the site myself, and once my System Engineers provided me with access to a server, I was pretty self-supporting. Managers doing websites with Dreamweaver is not a trend that is going to catch on even in today's technology oriented society, but blog editing tools provided by such services as Typepad, Radio, and Bubbler are getting easier to use, while tools such as Breeze and Contribute lend themselves well to even the most technologically inept managers who wish to foster a dynamic environment of web collaboration.
As useful as my internal website was, it was still one way communication. Getting feedback was a matter of sending out e-mails and hoping someone took the time to respond.
In fact if you have ever had the misfortune to be a manager trying to collect information by e-mail, you know that we desperately need better ways to gather feedback than e-mail. Trying to find feedback e-mails from twenty people spread over a week or more and hidden within close to one thousand e-mails is not very effective. I even tried setting up different e-mail accounts for feedback but invariably someone would send something to the wrong account.
Blogs with feedback help with this. RSS and other tools built around it can provide real time information from blogs and other content as needed to the people who need it without them having to think about what they need to do to access the information. Instead of being one more thing to remember, information becomes one thing where I don't have to spend my personal bandwidth. The information is at my finger tips. However, there MUST be trust between employees and managers for blogs to work. Managers must trust employees to be candid and professional in their blogs. Employees must trust that managers will read their candid feedback, rather than simply acknowledging there is an issue, and that their comments will be taken seriously. A series of rants and attitudes reminiscient of Netscape's Really Bad Attitude mailing list will both kill any chance of candid communication and could subject the company to legal ramifications.
Corporate internal websites are notorious for their complexity and their ability to hide just those pieces of information that you need. Not only that, they are hard to build, impossible to maintain, and in end the end are still just websites, mainly consisting of a series of links, rather than real content which requires consistent updating, often an onerous process requiring manual submission and approval of entries. Probably one of the first lessons to learn in a corporation is that the odds of the search engine actually working on the internal website are slim to non-existent.
With the new generation of tools non-technical managers can create blogs. Add a little more technical expertise and you have blogs with very important links and dynamic information. If you consider how RSS can increase the accessibility of information without burdening each individual, we are looking at something which can and will shake corporations to their roots. Having blogs have automatic RSS feeds that one only need subscribe to for instant updates can change the communication equation.
There is no question that blogs and RSS can be part of a solution for getting information to the people who need to know and who can effectively utilize the information to deliver the right services, solutions, and support to customers.
On another level, these new communication tools can solve the perplexing riddle of supposedly sophisticated corporations under utilizing their best and brightest people. If you have been a hiring manager in a Fortune 500 company, it is highly likely you have brought in a really bright person who has some really valuable ideas which you might even have tried to get in front of the right people.
If you are like the majority of managers, you watched this person become disillusioned. With a little luck they only ended up treating what could have been a career as just a job. It they were really good, they got frustrated and left the company.
Corporations are really bad at listening to people who have good ideas and suggestions. Again the problem is often that overwhelming e-mail in box. We gotten far beyond the telephone being a way to communicate up the corporate ladder and now e-mail is facing the same crisis. Of course some corporations solve this problem by hiring people to read their executives e-mail. This is something like having a human filter but it certainly does not solve to the communication problem to have a secretary send out a nice note under the CEO's signature thanking the employee for their input while the CEO never gets to see the input.
Many of today's corporations are based on star power to drive their business. One only has to observe the conditions under which Carly Fiorina (ex-CEO of HP) was recently sacked to observe a typical case study of the "Rock Star" CEO. Some have evolved and do operate with mature teams of people, but few corporations really harness the full intellectual power of their workforce. Why is this, you ask?
Managment and people in incumbent positions of power are reticent to actually admit that someone junior or in a different organization might actually have something to contribute to the company. Couple this with little or no rewards for real creativity and the real disincentive that you will find in some companies for rocking the boat and it is easy to see why there is rarely effective use of a corporations true brain power.
Exceptions to this norm are employee owned organizations such as SAIC, or organizations which base a percentage of variable compensation on 360 feedback such as Booz-Allen-Hamilton, or creative companies such as Google, where employees are encouraged to spend twenty percent of their work time on new projects unrelated to their tasks at hand. Few companies have evovled to the point of using anything but a small percentage of their corporate brain power.
Companies are working harder and harder at centralizing information through tools like SalesForce.com so their executives who have become and more isolated from their sales teams can understand what is happening. On the surface this looks like technology solving a problem. A closer look shows that to create static information out of what is essentially dynamic information might be more costly in the previous time of field resources than it is worth.
Often the information is out of date by the time it is laboriously entered on a keyboard by increasing stretched field people, which have little incentive to put the close details of their customer relationships into a tool which is little more than a managerial dashboard, and provides no value to the account executives other than to placate managers who manage by Excel & Powerpoint.
Having information available by automated RSS feed so that executives can subscribe as needed is a much better solution. Having executives stay in touch with their employees by catching their blogs is much better than trying to enforce regimented communication strategies such as obligatory “one on one” meetings or huge conference calls that drive everyone to distraction.
The companies of tomorrow will be built on trust, multi-point communication and collaboration, real time, dynamic update of information, and a fully utilized workforce.
Most computing people today with tell you that you get the most computing horsepower for your dollar by building a very scalable large cluster of standard servers instead of depending on a relatively finite much smaller number of complex processors sharing a single set of memory.
Of course for this to be successful, you have to write your software in a special way. The old ways of writing code will not work on today's new clusters. In fact we can probably build clusters faster than we can create the software to effectively utilize them. That, however, is only a temporary problem. The power is there, the software will come.
Just as writing software so that these fantastic new clusters can be utilized, creating the organizational structures that can effectively utilize these new methods of communication will take time.
There is no doubt the organizational structures will be different than what we have today. Few would argue that we have to change or something is going to break. There is just too much information, some of it of questionable value in the wrong hands, while critical information remains hidden in data warehouses that serve very basic needs but unfortunately cannot respond to the changing needs of an ever more sophisticated customer base.
Dennis Waitley
has a saying that, “Crisis is change trying to happen.” We have a
people crisis with an information crisis piled on top of a corporate
structure that is having trouble evolving. A handful of executives
will never have anything near the brain power of five thousand very
well educated employees. To compete in tomorrow‘s global economy, we
cannot depend on top down information driven by centralized information
warehouses.
Millions have been spent on information technology by corporations with few really good success stories. We may be about to change that.
The communication technology to change is here, the implementation and experimentation may be challenging but it will happen.
Watching old style corporations face this revolution is a little like watching a person in the surf facing a huge wave, they can either choose to ride the wave back successfully back to shore or have it crash over their head while they lose their footing and end up at best feeling like they are in a very large washing machine.
Special Note- Thanks to Stephen Bates and Erin Sobotta for providing input and editing suggestions
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