How to Manage a Camel

Mick Hides from the "How to Manage a Camel" Blog summarizes the essence of change management nicely:

The problem is that change involves everyone and everyone must be involved. Leaders must not only gain the buy-in, but also set the standard and reinforce the change on a daily basis. All change involves loss. Basically you have to give up one way of thinking/working and replace with a better (you hope) way of thinking/working. In a work environment, it takes a great deal of effort to get back to being as efficient and effective as you were before.

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Using Web 2.0 to Serve the Community and Marketing a Brand

Tyson Food, a US convenience food producer (chicken nuggets etc.) found a great viral marketing idea: They run a hunger relief campaign in Massachusetts. The company encourages readers on their campaign blog to comment to their action and for every blog comment they donate 100 pounds of food to the Greater Boston Food Bank. Originally they spoke about a truck of 35,000 pounds to fill. Within a five hours they had more than 700 comments and they decided to fill a second truck.

What a cool idea from a marketing perspective - whoever writes a comment, even a few words, stays a bit longer on the website than they would usually. And I looked up the corporate website because as a European I did not know them. Now I know them.

If it serves a good cause - the better.

Change Management – Coping with Change (Guest Post)

Change management is one of the most common reasons why organisations from the Private or Public Sectors approach interim management providers for Interim Managers, who are skilled at handling the most complex of change management programmes, sometimes across different geographies.

Change can occur for lots of different reasons, from the challenges of growth that an organisation is facing, changing global markets, changes in strategy, technological change, competitive processes including M&A, customer pressures or shifting markets.

Research shows that organisations are undergoing major change on average every 3 years, whilst smaller changes are occurring almost continually, and there are certainly no signs in the current economic climate that this will alter. Whilst each change is unique, Interim Managers can introduce different models; the two frequently adopted are either Lewin and Beer or Shaw's model.

But at the end of the day an Interim Manager has seen it all before and can draw on their immense experience, bringing with them sound programme and project management experience. They will understand how to pre-empt stakeholder concerns and possess the leadership skills to effectively communicate, facilitate and coach those resistant to change. Hand-holding those who require it to cope with change, together with all the issues surrounding re-alignment, performance management and motivation. Above all, they will remember that everyone reacts differently to change and has differing fundamental needs that have to be met. Change often involves a loss and people go through a 'loss curve' where expectations need to be managed realistically and fears need to be addressed.

Change management will often involve Interim managers playing a leading role in introducing new structures and systems. Above all a seasoned Interim Manager will deliver a Change Programme on time and on budget.

Read the original change management article.

Company 2.0

Peter Kim has published an impressive list of 324 companies which use social media for external communication (Benedikt Koehler has published a similar one for German companies, and Jeremyah Owyang has listed companies that were targetted and hit by social media because of an assumed or proven misbehavior). I am sure this list is far from complete but give a good indication of how the corporate world is adapting new technologies.

Some examples of successful application of Web 2.0 tools:

IBM

Blogging: 125 corporate blogs.
Forums: developerWorks.
Microblogging: Smart SOA SocialNetwork ((S3N)) Team on Twitter.
Online video: Rational Heroes machinima videos and Meet Mr. Fong on YouTube.
Podcasting: developerWorks and Social Networking Now.
Social networks: Rational Heroes community space.
Strategy: internal social computing guidelines
Virtual Worlds: IBM Business Center and Rational Software Conference/Hipihi in Second Life.
Wikis: developerWorks.

Not to mention the internal OD work that IBM does with the help of interactive, virtual tools such as its value jams.

Starbucks

Crowdsourcing: My Starbucks Idea, over 50,000 ideas submitted.
Microblogging: Twitter account.

As I have mentioned several times in this blog, the age of virtual change facilitation has just started a few years ago, and most companies still have not seen the value of Web 2.0 for their own enterprise - like it took many companies a couple of years until they understood that they must have a website. Do you know any mid-size or large company that does not have a website nowadays? Likewise, most companies will use some social networking tools in the future.

However, here the choice will me more difficult, as there are plenty of such tools for creating community. Forums, blogs, podcasts and wikis were the first technolgies applied by companies. Meanwhile, mashups (e.g. including Google Maps), micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), virtual worlds e.g. Second Life) are just some of the applications available.

While these tools have the potential to initiate and support change processes, their introduction becomes a change process by itself. You cannot force people to contribute to a social network on the Web - it only works if they see a compelling reason to do so and have some intrinsic motivation. Reason for employees of a company to blog, podcast, twitter etc. can be indeed manyfold, e.g.

- the desire to learn in communities of practice,
- the potential to engage with customers which in turn might increase a team's performance,
- the possibility to increase one's own knowledge on new media,
- the opportunity to increase one's own reputation and market value,
- the possibility to connect and socialize with co-workers, etc.

The IBM example (324+ blogs) shows that if a company is willing to provide a free space to express, people will do it naturally. ("As they'll tell you themselves, the opinions and interests expressed on IBMers' blogs are their own and don't necessarily represent this company's positions, strategies or views. But that doesn't mean we don't want you to read them! Because they do represent lots of business and technology expertise you can't get from anyone else."). What I like in particular is that the format of the blogs can be chosen individually by the bloggers.

Summarized, in terms of change management, Web 2.0 / social media for companies provide mechanisms for change management; their introduction requires a change management process in turn. Becoming a 21st century corporation might indeed require a cultural shift, and maybe a couple of older board members have had their cultural paradigm changes already...

Watch this Video with voices from Around the World on Climate Change

Oxfam staff is blogging live from the International Conference on Climate Change in Poznan. Some time ago, they produced a small but compelling video with interviews on the impact of climate change on the lives of ordinary people from South Africa, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Uganda.

5 ways that you can create a bloated, obsolete dinosaur of a company

Maria Gajewski from NeverTheSameRiverTwice has written a good post about who you can do to run down a company by introducing an anti change management programme. She takes reference to the Big 3 automakers in the US. Her suggestion are:

1) Build Protectionist Walls Around Your Business.
2) Take Advantage of Customer Loyalty by Building Lousy Products.
3) Assume the Future Will Be Just Like the Past.
4) Wait Until a Crisis Hits to Try to Change.
5) Blame Others, Beg for Money, and Reject Sound Advice.

Cool.

How Municipalities Should Integrate Social Media Into Disaster Planning

Jeremiah, a blogger from San Francisco, has written an interesting reflection on the role of social media during Mumbai bombings and other tragedies, and what municipal / regional / national / global planners can learn from it:

Social tools allow both true and false information to be rapidly communicated from sources in real time from anyone using a mobile device. During disasters this both enables and detracts emergency response... Local governments, authorities, and response teams should understand how these social tools work, learn how to integrate into disaster response, and evaluate how they will use them during an emergency.

For all who are in pre and post-disaster work, I really recommed this excellent article with a 5-steps strategy and some interesting comments which add to the article. Like I said before, social change is much slower than technological change, so I assume the issue is less the technology than the implementation in agencies and authorities which are notorious for being conservative and change resistant.

Technological and Social Change

One lesson I have learned over the last years is that technological change is much faster than social change. It has not been always like that, or has it? For the past 25,000 years or so, technological progress has been pretty slow and predictable. I found an interesting paper that was recently published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia: Social and Technological Change in Western History, accompanied by an well illustrated Power Point presentation. In his paper, Alex Wright gives a good account of the history of technologies for the collection and dissemination of information/knowledge and its implications on social history (I must read his book GLUT: Mastering Information Through the Ages).

Most technologies that revolutionized the way information was managed before and intiated social change are well known to us. Language, different forms of writing, eventually the different alphabets, handwritten books, the Gutenberg printing press, the steam engine enabling the industrialization of printing, telecommunication, and even the rise of personal computers all took their time and were slowly absorbed by mankind. In most cases, there was enough time for people to understand, digest and utilize the new technologies. Only 15 years after email became available and user friendly to more than a few computer geeks, somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people worldwide have an email account (the latest figure I could find was from 2005, when there were 668 million email users. Compare that to the growth of telephone users, which took about 100 years to reach the same dissemination, and only got a boost through the introduction of mobile phone technology.

Meanwhile the technological development moves on, hardly recognized by a large part of the population. Since about 5 years, knowledge and information is widely shared among people who in many cases don't know each other. We haven't really had time to digest that and understand what this means to social change. Well, the younger generation does. While 69% of US adults use email as their main form for sharing information, a growing part of young people marched on. They do not use email any more but one of their preferred social network services such as facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. "Power Sharers are a new category defined as individuals that share content at least weekly and share with 11 or more people through at least one channel. Adult Power Sharers represented 35% of the online population, and Youth Power sharers make up 62% of the online population." (taken from itfacts.biz).

Unlike many other authors I don't believe that the age of social networking was a short one and is basically over. We are still in the experimental phase of it. Change agents in organizations (and their consultants) have only started to scratch the surface of what can be and will be the future of collaboration of large networks. Just to remind you: companies are actually transforming into networks, dismantling their boundaries. It all has just begun. How can we believe that we can solve the problems of the 21st century with approaches from the 20th century?

The latest hot technology that I have just discovered is provided by a company called Cepstral, which is in text-to-speech conversion. Enter any sample text in English, Italian, German or Spanish and select whether you would like to hear it read from David, Linda, Vittoria, Matthias, Miguel or one of the other artificial voices. Instantly, and in a pretty good quality. Amazing

Photo: loop_oh on Flickr (CC licensed)

The HUB - a Place for Entrepreneurs to Work and Meet

For the last 6 months or so, I regular visit the Self-HUB in Berlin. Self is a part of a global network of HUBs, which provide flexible solutions for temporary and permanent working and meeting space and serve as points where social and other entrepreneurs can connect. HUBs meanwhile exist in 16 places around the world (Berlin, Bristol, London, Rotterdam, Brussels, Milan Stockholm, Madrid, Cairo, Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Toronto, Halifax, Sao Paolo) and more are in the making. Already, the connect more than 3000 people.

For me, as an entrepreneur, it is the ideal place to work - I just open my laptop and connect to the WLan, I can find people there who can provide services that I need (admin, marketing, etc.) and I can create more connections. And the HUB is really a fun place to work.