Technology and Organizations

Friends have been asking for more information about my Zappos Tour. Here goes:

Anyone can sign-up for a free tour. (See post on Zappos and transparency.) They even run shuttles to help you get there.

My tour started at 9 a.m. this Wed. Checked in and started checking out the lobby:

Zappos Lobby

The lobby also holds the bookshelves where Zappos employees can come and pick-up books on management. No check-out, just use the material to learn. (When asked for a “tour-confession” later that morning, I declared that I would get copies of my book into that bookshelf.)

The lobby has a tiny museum. Here are a pair of shoes like the ones that caused Zappos to be born. Nick Swinmurn couldn’t find these and it gave him the idea to start Shoesite.com in 1999. The switch to Zappos.com came as it’s a better name (my view) and so they wouldn’t be constrained to shoes.

AirWalks

1999 Pitchbook

This is Jon our tour guide. He’s part of the Zappos Insights group and I think is also head of tours. He did an amazing job.

Jon telling us the Zappos history

Heading down the first hallway we saw framed commemorative t-shirts for each major sales goal. On the other side of hallway are caricatures of employees who have hit major goals/successes. A little further down and I spy the tablecloth quilt of brainstorm ideas from the April 2010 all hands’ meeting!

Part of Quilt of Ideas

As we get into the main floors we get our first greeting. Groups sit together, decorate their own area and have a special way of saying hello to people who come to visit. (Zappos now has three buildings in this office park, two occupied at the moment. They’re working on how to keep employees visiting both.)

In the Zappos Lab area we get to see a pair of size 20 shoes.

Very cool Zappos Labcoat

Zappos thought about having an open door policy for the execs. Then they decided it was just easier not to have doors. The execs sit in an area called “Monkey Row.”

Jungle theme for Monkey Row.

Keith Glynn wasn’t in. I would have liked to have said thank you in person for all the help with the fulfillment article.

Keith's seat on Monkey Row

We had a great time visiting with the different groups. In the customer loyalty area (people who take help & order calls), Jon tells us about how each new employee works in the loyalty area, no matter what their ultimate job. Video of him describing the importance of making connections with the customers:

Zappos Customer Loyalty Connections from Terri Griffith on Vimeo.

They keep a big white board down the hall showing call statistics. The goal is great customer service, not number of calls taken or shoes sold. They focus on how quickly calls are answered and how few calls are abandoned. (Zappos Insights offers for-fee courses on their whole process.)

Longest Call (7h 28m) Record Holder

Training is very important at Zappos — across your current job, job development, and personal growth. Three different groups: on-boarding, Pipeline, and Zappos Insights.

Tony the DJ (Desk Jockey for the day), Part of Customer Loyalty training group

In the downstairs hallway there is a bulletin board with pictures of teams that have taken immersion trips to Kentucky and the Fulfillment Center and teams from the Kentucky Fulfillment Center that have come to learn about the Las Vegas operations. The lobby also has a TV running video from the Fulfillment Center. You can tell they work hard to be a single family.

End of my tour included one-on-one time with Jon and then with Robert. I’d paid the extra bit for a “tour plus.” Even though Jon answered a ton of questions during the tour, it was nice to know I could ask all my management-nerd questions at the end. Overall, there was never a rushed moment, never anything we couldn’t ask — and yes, I even got to meet Tony Hsieh.

We’d seen Tony on his way to the Dunk Tank. Turns out they were raising money (and cooling off) back behind the building. Robert kindly took me back there where I could help some people get wet. I introduced myself to Tony, I’m sure gushing about the tour, and then asked for this picture:

Tony Post Dunk

Take the tour! Fly Southwest to get to Vegas and compare the two organizations. Tony’s book, Delivering Happiness, is great; Zappos Insight’s website is great; but there is huge value to seeing and hearing from so many Zappos people.

Today was my Zappos Tour.  The Zappos Family seems to be doing everything they can think of to share how they WOW! their customers and employees. They better share since we can’t all go work for them (tidbit from the tour: a lower percentage of applicants get jobs at Zappos than apply and get into Harvard). What’s the secret sauce?  The Zappos Family core values. My translation: Transparency and the drive to do better.

Their transparency takes a variety of forms. I’ve talked about how Zappos live streamed their last all hands’ meeting to the world [9/26/2010 update: Streaming from 1-5pm pacific, click here to sign up for access]. They have an entire piece of the organization, Zappos Insights, focused on sharing via tours, answering questions on-line, and management education. The Delivering Happiness 20 city bus tour is about to begin… and they’re accepting applications for one more person!

Why share your secret sauce?  From Zappos Insights:

It all started when Tony [Hsieh, the CEO] decided to be completely open and transparent about how the Zappos Family does business. So many businesses not only wanted to learn the “what,” they wanted to learn “how” we do what we do. Zappos Insights (ZI) was assembled as our crack commando force team to give you all the tools you need to develop the culture you desire.

Zappos has been being transparent since the beginning.  In Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh’s new book), Fred Mossler (part of the founding team) describes how they decided that they should let the vendors have the same information the Zappos buyers had:

I’ll never forget the afternoon I turned my chair around and asked Tony what he thought about giving vendors access to the same information as our buyers.  Traditionally in retail, information is hoarded, kept secret, and used as leverage against the vendors to get more out of them…. But if we created true transparency in our business, not only would they help us, they’d benefit as well.

Not too long after I proposed the idea to Tony, he spun back around and said “Were you thinking about something like this?” He created the beginning of what we now refer to as “the extranet”…. vendors have complete visibility into the business (p. 187).

The reasoning in the book is that the average buyer at Zappos is working with 50 brands, but by being transparent to those brands’ representatives, there are 50 other people helping to run the business.

Ok, that makes business sense.  But what about the value of being transparent with the rest of their secret sauce?  My thinking:

• It’s a good deed and completely in-line with their values.
• It gives Zappos employees the opportunity to share their commitment to the core values with the world — deepening their own commitment.
• Sharing is more than a one-way street.  By sharing Zappos is opening up the possibility that their partners will also share back — and they have extended the definition of partner to include us all.  Think of all the new ideas that can come their way.
• The more we trust each other, the easier it is for all of us to work together.  Trust is a relationship built on being vulnerable. The more often you trust someone and they come through, the more trust you have in that relationship. Zappos is taking the first step in building trusting relationships with all of us.

What can we do in return?

We can’t all go work for them (see note above, though I do hope one of my graduating students will get the chance).  We can do our best to deliver some of our own happiness and build transparency in a way that will make it better for our employees and business partners.  In November I said that transparency was the concept of the quarter.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that transparency is the concept of the decade.

Have you provided transparency to your employees or business partners?  Care to be transparent with the results?  Click on the respond link below and let’s start a conversation.

Many thanks to all the Zappos Family members I met today and have had the chance to talk with over the last few months.  Jon & Robert, special thanks to you for the tour, and Marie for setting it up.

Some of my prior Zappos posts:

• Wow! from the Zappos Fulfillment Center
• Helping Others Develop Systems Savvy: Learning from Zappos, Leadership, and Design
• Delivering Happiness: The Movement
• Tony Hsieh’s New Book: Delivering Happiness
• Zappos Has Insights and I’m in Awe

Thursday, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is hosting author Charlene Li in their Forum series.  She’s presenting Open leadership: How social technology can transform the way you lead (PARC forums are generally free and open to the public, info here).  Charlene is the best selling author of the 2010 book Open Leadership and co-author of Groundswell (2008).

I’ve just started Open Leadership, but I’m very excited about the first chapter: “Why Giving Up Control Is Inevitable.”  I’ve been meaning to write a post entitled ““Let it Go” and “Get Over It” — Why, when not said by your 13 year old kid, these are great ideas,” but Charlene seems to have done it for me.  My main take-away:

..new technologies allow us to let go of control and still be in command, because better, cheaper communication tools give us the ability to be intimately familiar with what is happening with both customers and employees.  The result of these new relationships is open leadership, which I define as:

having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals

She has (positive) examples from Best Buy, Dell, Cisco, P&G, the State Bank of India, and the U.S. Department of State.  This gives me hope.  If, as she describes, “making the elephant dance” is possible, then I am hopeful for my students and for our economies.

Where I expect a full reading of the book will help is in identifying the key levers or touch points for opening leadership.  For example, Tracy Allison Altman’s recent guest post Getting Beyond Pseudo-Transparency: The Role of Evidence in Participation and Performance describes some levers that make modern organizational transparency work.  Tracy closed with:

People + Connectedness + Evidence = Transparent Participation. Without evidence, people can participate in conversations about what really is working, or is likely to work, for their organization. They can come up with theories, make forecasts, estimate risks, and generate new ideas. But eventually, they’ll need some evidence to prove all that up.

Charlene seems to be saying (remember, I haven’t finished the book) that social technologies (e.g., Facebook, blogging, Twitter, enterprise collaborative spaces) give employees and leadership enough insight into what is going on that they can quit monitoring and worry about supporting the business as it moves ahead.

What I’m not clear on is how to develop this kind of vision.  I mean vision in two ways: dream with direction, and ability to discern what’s going on.  I think I have the first kind given my excitement about the growth of transparency in organizations today.  What I don’t know is how to create a general system for discerning organizational reality from actions within social technologies.  Any thoughts on how to phrase that in a question for Charlene? Or, better yet, join me at the Forum.

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Hank Chesbrough will be speaking at the Aug 26 PARC Forum.

Last night I had the pleasure of introducing John Hagel at a TEDxBayArea event.  He came to talk with us about The Power of Pull, his new book with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, and the broad-based shifts in our organizational and social environment.

Others have written great general reviews about the book (e.g., here & here) , so I don’t feel guilty about putting a systems savvy filter on my comments.  I see The Power of Pull as emphasizing the need for systems savvy management.  That is, the environmental shifts described in the book demand that you use a solid understanding of available technology tools, organizational practices, and human capabilities to weave together effective organizational and personal action. The Power of Pull also gives us examples of what this weaving might look like.

The Big Shift: Environmental Changes That Demand Systems Savvy Management

Before, the pattern of how technology tools, organizational practice, and people were woven together was generally pushed down from above, and not always effectively. Things have changed.  We have entered a period where important patterns (everything from organizational innovations to personal work strategies) can come from anywhere.  The Power of Pull describes three waves of this Big Shift:

• First wave of the Big Shift: New platforms built on the Internet.  This wave has already arrived.
• Second wave: Focus on flows versus stockpiles of knowledge.  Our feet are wet on this one.  Facebook, Twitter, corporate and employee blogs, customer-built technical support — these are at the forefront of this wave.
• Third wave: Organizational changes that result from the forces of the first two waves.  The emerging business relationships built on communication from throughout organizations are examples of this wave. SAP, for example, opened enough of its technical “secret sauce” to engage a number of partners who could then develop SAP innovations independent of SAP own engineers.  Turns out these efforts are beneficial to all.

The Power of Pull

With these shifts we have the opportunity (need) to “pull” rather than waiting for opportunities to be pushed down from above. We can pull by gaining access to people and resources in ways we never could before, attracting people and resources through our own participation and personal and project branding, and then using these resources to contribute by achieving new outcomes from our own potential.

How we do this is where I see the value of systems savvy management.  How do we decide what pieces of the technology infrastructure to use for our access?  How do we decide how to best build systems that help us attract the right people and resources?  How do we design organizational systems that will help us achieve our goals (working with the people we’ve attracted, the technology systems we have at our disposal, the organizational policies and procedures that distribute benefits to all involved, all with and understanding of our specific context). Systems savvy can help us weave these components together into something that can surf these waves of transformation.

John suggests five steps to start with (my weaving suggestions in italics):

1. Master the strength of weak ties. Use technology tools like LinkedIn or Facebook to access people outside of your usual circle.  Then find or create opportunities to meet face-to-face in ways that support your passion — just sharing coffee is not enough, you need to focus on work-related issues to understand each others’ relative strengths and who else you might want to bring into the network.
2. Grow your personal ecosystem. Use technology tools both inside and outside your organization to find activities that can support your tasks (perhaps a community of practice).  If you don’t find any, build one.  Use technology and organizational practice to strengthen the infrastructure in terms of its focus on learning, building a common language, being a repository of good ideas). Have a system in place for finding new members over time.
3. Choose wisely where you live and spend time to be in the right place at the right time. Use your technology tools to track the right times and places.  Start relationships before you get there and use your tools to maintain the relationships over time.
4. Find environments where people share your passions. For me the critical term is “share.”  Find the environment and then share.  This may be face to face, over the Internet, or a hybrid approach where you meet occasionally.  The conference behaviors John describes are great for keeping your (and others’) enthusiasm high.
5. Join a creation space. My favorite. Be it face to face or virtual, engage with people to create along the lines of your passion.  For me this is finding the opportunity to engage with others who use systems savvy on the job.  By working together we can tackle the bigger problems or use our diversity of background to solve the tricky small ones.

My summary: Use available (or acquirable) technology tools and organizational practices to build your ecosystem and then do something with it.  Play fair — be a producer as well as an acquirer from the social network.  Appreciate that small twists and turns made at the right time result in strong, beautiful, work.

There are no silver or “magic” bullets for organizations.  Google Wave was a single technology bullet.  The introduction of Wave had no organizational practice wrapped around it and little indicating consideration of how people would perceive it.  Organizations are complex systems and betting success on any single dimension is unlikely to work. There was no implementation. There were limited use cases.  Even access was limited until recently, meaning you couldn’t drag others along with you in your experimentation. (Wikipedia version of the history here.)

As I understand Google’s approach with Wave, it was to give Wave to the world as a platform.  Developers were expected build tools around Wave that normal people would use (perhaps as email platforms are built around Intenet email protocols).  I bought into that approach and followed the Google Wave Interest Group so I’d be ready when the developers got it all together.  I tried to get some other generally early adopters to try it out, to no avail, and many others were similarly frustrated.  Conferences were where of I heard the most success as the real-time/rich communication aspects were highlighted in that focused environment.

According to a Google announcement, Google will stop their own development of Wave and may shut down the site after the end of the year. Open source access to some of the capabilities will remain and aspects may be included in other Google products. Jeffrey Mann, writing for Gartner, points out that developers and users may be less likely to spend effort on Google products given the apparent lack of long-haul commitment.  Wave was only fully open to the public as of May 2010 and the cited reason for shutting it down is low user adoption.

The folks at Google are smart.  They’ve done (and do) amazing things. But they do seem to have technology bias that may be getting in their way.  In Kathryn Schulz’ recent interview with Google Research Director Peter Norvig we get some clues:

From a story about the founding of Google:

One of the venture capitalists came to [company founders] Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] and said “OK, the first thing you have to decide is, is this company going to be run by sales or by marketing? They said, “We think we’ll take engineering.” He laughed and said, “Oh, you naive college kids, that’s not the way the real world works.” And they said, “Well, we want to try it.” Ten years later, that experiment is still running; engineering is still the center of the company. And it seems like it’s worked.

I’ll argue that this single-minded approach sometimes works because some of Google’s products are so good, or fit into existing systems so well, that they can get away without implementation.  But I think Wave (and perhaps Google’s other visible failures) indicate that they could do better by stepping away from the myth of the silver bullet.  Om Malik says, “I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries.”  For added success, Google needs to understand people and the organizational systems we all live in.

Google seems to need more systems savvy.  Systems savvy management is the opposite of a silver bullet approach.  Like the woven fibers of a bullet-proof vest, systems savvy management intertwines technology tools, organizational practices, and people for flexible strength.

What did I want from Wave?  I liked the idea of a persistent activity stream that could handle multiple file types.  I saw it as a way of consolidating project documents with their history and discussion.  We have this to a degree with products like Socialtext, and given Socialtext’s careful consideration of the broader issues, I expect they’ll be tracking the Wave experience.