The Liminal State
A few days ago, I posted about the chasm between “social media” and “enterprise 2.0″ – about the different messaging, models and modes of thinking, but all with what I think is common ground. Over the past few days, I’ve found myself in interesting conversations around “social CRM,” the collision of tools like twitter and [...]
Management by Community
At the Spigit Customer Summit, Gary Hamel described an innovative management approach that has stuck with me. W.L. Gore management has a hands-off approach to managing employees. Each employee is free to say ‘no’ to any request by a colleague. That’s right. Refuse to do something a colleague asks. Damn, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t [...]
The Agile Origins of Project Management 2.0
In my previous post I brought up the topic of enterprise agility. My conclusion was: to be agile and adapt quickly to the ever-changing business environment, you need to be able to blend top-down control with bottom-up agility in a “Ying and Yang” style. I also mentioned the latest research, showing that teams that foster [...]
Enterprise 2.0 Needs To Stop Being So Naive
You know I really struggle to get excited about Enterprise 2.0. Not because I don’t think IT needs to undergo change, but because I feel that Enterprise 2.0 as we seem to be defining it, and covering it in the press and the blogosphere just doesn’t seem to be solving the key issues that either [...]
The Promise of Contextual Expert Search in Enterprise 2.0
A few years ago I was involved in developing an exciting new product that promised to change the internet. Let’s just say it would have added an extra dimension to an otherwise 2D experience. We struggled with the use cases, struggled with the design and fought over the initial release specifications. Most of all we [...]
Crossing the Social Media/E2.0 Chasm
Gia Lyons put up a very interesting blog post yesterday entitled, “Social Media is from Mars, Enterprise 2.0 is from Venus.” In it, she talks about her experience at a recent conference, where she experienced the gap between what we think of as “social media” and what we think of as “enterprise 2.0.” Gia goes [...]
Muddling Through Metaphors
In the past day or so, there’s been some talk of Twitter’s dim future — all predicated on the fact that “kids” (people 18-25ish) don’t really like the service. Okay, it’s not really a “dim future,” so much as it is a future that’s dimmer than you’d think. I can personally attest to some of [...]
The Importance of Psychological Currency: Connecting Mind To Enterprise (Part 2)
Thinking about how people work in today’s enterprise reminds me of the movie Being John Malkovich. You know what I’m talking about – it’s like the low-ceiling offices on floor 7½ of the Mertin Flemmer building in New York City. The ceiling is all of 4 1/2 feet high, and they have to emergency-stop the [...]
Democracies Don’t Suffer Famines: Implications for Corporate Governance
In his keynote at the Spigit Customer Summit, Gary Hamel said that something that caught my attention: democracies don’t suffer famines. Hearing this, I was intrigued and did some research. Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, made this empirical observation: One of the remarkable facts in the terrible history of famine [...]
Gary Hamel on Enterprise 2.0 and the Post-Establishment Age
Last week at the first-ever Spigit Customer Summit, I had a chance to listen to Gary Hamel live. He delivered the keynote for the event, “Inventing Management 2.0.” If you’re a reader of Gary’s blog or his books, you know he’s a big proponent of empowering employees and changing management paradigms. See his 25 Stretch [...]
The importance of Psychological Currency in Enterprise 2.0 (Part I)
There are so many things floating around about Enterprise 2.0 lately that touch on the 50,000 ft view, but not many that dive into the details. Before we see mass adoption in the Enterprise like we have seen with social media outside the Enterprise, some key psychological characteristics need to be properly converted. I recall [...]
Cowboy hats and Cuban Cigars
I’m not sure what *exactly* this has to do with Defrag, but I’m filing this under “things I’ve experienced as of late that may hold something to explore.” In roughly the last month, I’ve experienced two cultural niches that are fairly distinct from each other: Ybor city and the Flea Market at the Belle-Clair Fairgrounds. [...]
Can you Become Agile, When Managing Projects the Top-Down Style?
I posted on enterprise agility before, but recently I came across some very interesting research data, so I decided to give this topic a different angle, taking the present economic conditions into consideration. The ups and downs of our economy are enough to make any executive dizzy. Just look at U.S. Steel (X). In the [...]
