One of the critical challenges with enterprise collaboration (a Steve noted earlier) is determining how to measure and reward it. For inspiration on how to solve this problem, I look to non-corporate collaborative context – professional sports, and more specifically, the NBA. In this environment, success is based largely on collaboration between players, individual and team outcomes and rewards are easily measured, and some efforts are being made to measure the value of teamwork in a quantitative sense.

What really propelled my thinking in this area was an article written back in February in the New York Times. “The No-Stats All-Star” written by Michael Lewis, (author of “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”) highlights “a basketball mystery: a player [who] is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.” Specifically, the article dissects the play of Shane Battier, a collaborative team player whose value is difficult to measure using traditional basketball statistics.

So why look at basketball for insight on how to measure collaboration rather than some other sport? As Lewis notes, “The difference in basketball is that it happens to be the sport that is most like life.” What the author means is that basketball is not a series of one-on-one contests between individuals, as with baseball, or a series of plays determined by a coach, as with football. Rather, basketball is a truly collaborative effort with many subtle offensive and defensive moves taking place simultaneously by a number of players. What’s more, in basketball “the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.” Sound familiar?

Continue reading…

While generally a believer in how collaboration can lead to better insights and greater efficiency, I continually see examples of where it is neither effective, nor terribly efficient – and in the worst cases totally counter-productive. I work in a highly collaborative environment and study many others, and my experiences have led me to two areas where problems typically emerge:

1. At an individual level people suffer from cognitive overload. As people get busy and collaborate across a multitude of projects, the brain gets distracted, and the quality of the output suffers. In short, one person can only do so much.
2. At a project level where you run into a situation of ‘too many cooks spoiling the broth.’ In short, only so many people can do one thing.

If you put the two of these together, the worst-case scenario is that in an individual could join a project as the Nth person who ‘spoils the broth,’ while the time they dedicate towards doing so distracts them from their other work – which, continuing the cooking metaphor, leads them to burn the toast as well.

The problem is, it’s very difficult to apply a scientific approach to measure exactly how many people per project, and conversely how many projects per person is optimal. The most well-known study around this is Dunbar’s Number, which sets “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships” at 150. In terms of collaborative overhead, Dunbar speculates that “as much as 42% of the group’s time would have to be devoted to social grooming.” Now that might be acceptable for the hunter-gatherer societies described in Dunbar’s anthropological study, but I would imagine this amount of “grooming” time would be extremely unproductive in an enterprise context.

Continue reading…

Have you ever seen a TV commercial for a free mobile phone application? I hadn’t until just last night when I happened to see this while watching prime time TV:

Continue reading…

Given how emotional people get about their micro-blogging, I thought I’d include a disclaimer on this post: The views contained in this post are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of the entire Wikinomics team. While we often disagree on topics of Twitter, I think we can all agree that there are there are opportunities for improvement across the Twitterverse.

The Wikinomics team has many posts discussing the real potential of Twitter for business value. This is how I predominantly use the tool: As an efficient way to find new stories relevant to my research, as well as discover interesting or amusing content, and occasionally peek into the personal lives of interesting people. A good signal-to-noise ratio is critical for this type of usage.

I use Tweet Deck to help filter my updates, but it still becomes a challenge because filtering is by individual, not content. That means if I add someone to my “Main Feed,” I have to somewhat trust that they will act responsibly. What do I mean by responsible? The other day I opened Twitter and notice 39 tweets in a row from the same person, most of which were links. Literally 39! That’s irresponsible. It’s also not a way to get noticed on Twitter, but rather ignored.

Responsible Twitter users abide by four simple rules:

1. You learn something new everyday
2. Twitter is not chat
3. Don’t be a needy jerk
4. Ignore rules 1 to 3 if you are in marketing

Continue reading…

As someone growing up in an immigrant family with a strong emphasis on education, it’s somewhat blasphemous to suggest that grad school is a waste of time. However, there does seem to be a growing sense that the traditional ROI associated with higher education is shifting. Rising tuition is being met with fewer job opportunities (especially for PhDs) and a renewed interest in entrepreneurism, while at the same time education in general is coming under fire for its antiquated model of pedagogy.

As an example, a recent study by Skidmore economist Sandy Baum and the College Board, approximates the real lifetime value of a college degree at about $300,000. This estimate is based on the assumption that those with college degrees earn an average of $20,000 more per year than non-graduates, and takes into account the average cost of tuition and books, as well as annual inflation over a forty-year career. This estimate is down from previous calculations of an approximately $1 million payback. Mind you, this is for undergraduate degrees. It begs the question: What about more specialized and more expensive graduate degrees (expensive both in terms of tuition and opportunity costs)?

MBA degrees are a specific point of contention. While conventional wisdom will have people flooding into MBA schools, there is also a sense that maybe professionals should seek to upgrade through less conventional, more productive means. Indeed, the sheen associated with an MBA is tarnished by the fact that many of the financial decision makers that perpetrated the economic downturn were themselves alumni of some of the most respected business schools.

Continue reading…

A recent study commissioned by Work+Life Fit found that fully 94% of those surveyed would be willing to accept flexible alternatives to their current work arrangement in order to avoid layoffs. Among the types of alternatives considered, the top three measures favored by employees include moving to a four-day workweek, but with the same amount of hours worked (78% of respondents), adding additional unpaid vacation days to the year (59%), and taking a one- to two-weeks furlough (59%).

As part of a project I’m working on that deals with talent issues in the current recession, I recently had a chance to chat with Cali Yost, CEO of Work+Life Fit and Fast Company expert blogger. Cali talked to me about flexible alternatives to mass layoffs, whether or not there’s still a war for talent, employee engagement in recessionary climate, and the need for a new enterprise mindset around agile talent and the execution of talent strategies:

Continue reading…

Even in the current economic climate, there is still a ton of equity out there that few companies have thought to tap into. What the heck am I talking about? Think inheritance. That’s right; despite the financial collapse of 2008, we could still be on the brink of a gargantuan redistribution of wealth from passing GIs to Baby Boomers and eventually from retiring Boomers to their inheritors. According to a Deloitte estimate, the Net Gen is set to eventually inherit $17.8 trillion dollars.

Of course no one really knows how much accumulated wealth there is in the GI and Boomer generations, or how longer life expectancies and inheritance taxes will affect the transfer of wealth, or if the current downturn will eventually empty the Boomers coffers, leaving nothing at all. Still, there seems to be an untapped opportunity in there somewhere.

For companies with Boomer marketing strategies, it could mean it’s time to start thinking about what strategies are needed to ensure that Boomer assets and business stay with the enterprise. At the very least it’s a whole new angle on retention and relationship marketing – call it “inheritance marketing” if you will. I recently came across the term gerentocracy to describe the imbalance of political power between the young and the old. How about geriadvertising for Boomer-inspired advertising?

Continue reading…

Economic downturns tend to invoke a lot of immediate concerns – understandably, people are worried about jobs, security, and keeping a roof overhead. But, I often wonder how this will affect our personalities in the long run. Just think of your grandmother hoarding elastic bands and paying the grocer in exact change – behavioural imprints (or scars) left over from previous economic traumas.

Joseph Brusuelas, economist at Moody’s Economy.com is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying he fears “we’ve lost a generation of investors.” His take was that people won’t invest because they won’t have the money to do so, but I think it’s safe to say that there will also be a certain lack of trust in the market. Have we gained a generation of entrepreneurs? A generation of socialists, scrutinizers, realists, and environmentalist?

Jon Stewart’s “senior black correspondent” Larry Willmore jests that the swath of white collar crime leading into the recession will change the face of criminality in America such that the Wall Street look (i.e. white men in suits and ties) will be seen as inherently untrustworthy in the future. Willmore’s analysis is satirical, but looking at our own research here at nGenera, Scrutiny and Integrity are two of the eight norms of the Net Generation that will definitely be amplified by the recession (the other norms are Freedom, Customization, Collaboration, Entertainment, Speed, and Innovation). If the Net Gen weren’t already scrutinizing corporate America before, they certainly will be now.

For some deeper thinking on the effect of the recession on the Net Gen, I turn to Fast Company staff writer and author of Generation Debt, Anya Kamenetz. As Anya rightly noted in one of her Yahoo! Finance columns, “Economic dramas shape an entire generation’s beliefs about the nature of the economy and the risks involved.” That was a year ago and already she was postulating about how the Net Gen’s psyche might be shaped. Specifically, she noted that young people:

• Won’t expect to get rich quick.
• Will “get real” about consumption.
• Will buy on the cheap.

I spoke with Anya recently so I thought I’d ask her to elaborate on her thinking.

What effect do you think this recession will have on the psyche of people entering the workforce now?

“The climate in the last 10 years has been a very unrealistic one. We have been living in this huge bubble. For young people who are entering the 20’s now, this is really all they knew: Inflated expectations, ridiculous monthly consumer debt, and the idea that you don’t need to save for the future because you can just count on the equity in your house. But, when the bubble bursts, the paradigm shifts. For young people now, they are really looking around and seeing the world as being a very different place. For older people, it can be a lot more traumatic to have this happen, but for young people, they’re more ready to maybe accept that change.

Continue reading…

I’d like to share a graphic that I’ve been using a lot lately in my presentations about Wikinomics approaches to contact centers.  The original source, I’ve learned, is from the book “Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow,” by Chip Conley.  However, I originally came across it while looking at some presentations on SlideShare that were posted by the founders of the third-party customer relations portal Get Satisfaction.

I really like this graphic because it highlights why customer interaction strategies are changing from a transactional approach to one where we focus on the broader customer experience.  I think it’s particularly relevant when we think about what is needed to satisfy each level of the pyramid. 

• Level 1: Companies can meet expectations with current customer service model.  Simply optimizing transactions, having the answers to customer queries, and providing a decent level of service is where the bar is set right now.  Amazingly, many organizations are still struggling to meet these simple customer needs.
• Level 2: To fulfill desires, companies have to figure out exactly what those desires are.  Usually they are articulated, but buried in call data and interactions with company employees.  Analytic tools and predictive modeling software now exist to help companies make sense of customer data, measure emotional responses, quantify customer wants, and respond accordingly.  It can be complex, but it’s not rocket science.  You’re front line employees probably have a good idea of what the customer is asking for; just ask them.
• Level 3: To meet unrecognized needs you have to learn more about the customer and develop a certain intuition about what would make them happy.  The only way to do this is to interact with them – build on what you learned from Level 2, engage them in conversations, and take the time to get to know them at an individual level.  Unrecognized needs are often not articulated, so you have to read between the lines to figure out what is missing from the customer experience.

Continue reading…

We often talk about the concept of reality mining, or using technology tools to identify patterns in behaviour. It can be kind of an abstract concept, but opportunities exist for companies to measure, understand, and extract value from all sorts of everyday consumer activities. By learning more about their customers, companies can better inform product decisions, improve marketing, and offer more targeted sales and customer service strategies.

If you want to think about where companies can tap in, just think about the hundreds or thousands of data points you create each and every day. As an example, Alan and I were talking about my last Rogers bill and I just realized that I’m leaving a data trail that any savvy marketer could sniff out from a (virtual) mile away. Privacy concerns aside, if the good folks over at Rogers ever decided to mine my data from the last 30 days or so, it would be pretty easy to decipher what I’ve been up to lately. Consider the following:

• My cell phone was off for almost two days straight, with the exception of a series of call made at random hours of the day to two phone numbers.
• Phone records might reveal those numbers belonged to my parents (easily discernable by last name) and my wife’s parents (maybe not as obvious).
• Triangulation of my cell phone signal during those brief calls would indicate that I was at a hospital.
• Following those two days of cellular silence, there was a flurry of in-bound calls from all over the globe – although few calls were answered.
• About a week later there was a corresponding flurry of outbound calls.
• Additional triangulation of my phone signal might reveal that I was at home the entire time after leaving the hospital (and overall, more home-bound throughout the rest of the month).
• Two weeks later there was a dramatic increase in calls and text messages between me and my wife during work hours.

Any guesses?

Continue reading…