Technology and Organizations

If you’re a subscriber to this blog (and I hope you are), you know I’m intrigued by Zappos’ organizational design and overall management strategies. I find myself visiting three different Zappos sites regularly:

• ZapposInsights.com – site and web community around what makes Zappos unique and how Zappos does business. They offer free open tours, formal management training and the for-fee membership site even has a section called “Ask Anything.”
• DeliveringHappinessBook.com – site and web community around the ideas in Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness. They’re sharing and they want us to share too: “Our higher purpose? Delivering happiness to the world. Make it yours too and help spread the word to family, friends and colleagues alike!”
• Zappos.com (a girl does need shoes you know!)

What’s so intriguing to me is that through these sites and organizational activities Zappos seems to have found a way to help others develop culture savvy. Culture savvy, like systems savvy, is a complex area of organizational expertise that is often learned by experience and challenge, not by just by reading or hearing a lecture (for background, see Drinking Beer and Understanding Culture Embodiment). Zappos is offering us a way to learn their approach to organizational culture through a variety of rich experiences and dialogue. (For more on the value of dialogue, see Ed Schein’s article.)

Rich experiences, I believe, are at the heart of helping others learn any complex systems skills. Additional evidence? Consider leadership and design.

Leadership savvy is another complex area that is best taught through modeling, learning by doing, and reflection. Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner write in the 4th edition of The Leadership Challenge that leadership, like any skill, “can be strengthened, honed, and enhanced, given the motivation and desire, along with practice and feedback, role models, and coaching” p. 340. In the related instructors’ guide they continue:

In our own studies, as well as others by the Center for Creative Leadership and corporations like Honeywell, three major opportunities for learning to lead emerge: (a) trial and error, (b) observation of others, and (c) formal education and training. pp. ix-x.

From a design perspective, Dan Saffer, writing for the Adaptive Path blog similarly pushes for an active role,

I was taught that design has three components: thinking, making, and doing. (Doing is the synthesis, presentation, and evaluation of a design; the bridge between thinking and making.)…

Details often get overlooked in just “thinking” projects, as do constraints. Constraints are somehow less solid in the world of thought than they are in the world of making.

So, how do we help others learn systems savvy? By using the same ideas that Zappos, Kouszes, Posner, and Saffer offer for spreading other complex skills: Provide opportunities to try (and fail), observe others, and get formal training when it’s appropriate. We all have to get our hands dirty if we’re going to do this well.

Background examples from prior posts:

Stewart Mader and Sharing Systems Savvy – “Don’t let the words get in the way…. That is, don’t let the terms (e.g., wiki, open innovation) put a barrier between you and the people you’re helping to understand systems savvy. Focus on the work.”

Gaining Value from Blue & White Collar Systems Savvy – Ben Kepes – Value from diverse groups working together, “The mental models held by people in the two roles are different. One is not better or more sophisticated than the other, but they are different.”

Jennifer Kenny – Helping Others Become TOP Managers — “We knew that they knew a 1000 times more about their actual work than we did — training wouldn’t make sense. Instead, we helped them tap into their knowledge using the common language about their work — mobilization of their own ideas. Joint design, metrics and analysis.”

Transformation Through Demonstration: Megan Gailey and the Implementation of Meeting Support — “I tend to focus on the people who are the willing participants… the early adopters. Then through their demonstration and behavior change, show success. [The success] sways the resistors and the people on the fence. Get the earlier adoptors excited and the fence people come along.”

Don’t Hide Your Systems Savvy Practices – “Explicit use of systems savvy is better than tacit use because it allows others to coordinate. Think about the benefits gained in a kick-off project meeting if the group comes to a set of explicit decisions about where files will be stored, how sign-offs will be managed, and the best strategies for communicating.”

Think Out Loud With Me – Rhonda Winter, CIO of Indianapolis Motor Speedway — “If you say, “can you think out loud with me” then even the most bashful will enter the conversation. We may not make the decisions that day, but we get the conversation started.

[Thinking out loud is a] great teaching tool, helps make clear that it’s ok to make a mistake – creates an environment where you can play with the ideas out loud; first idea may not be best, but it’s the conversation starter.”

Last night was the Santa Clara University Business School Alumni Council’s panel Tweets, Tags, and Texts: Making Social Media Work for You. I had the pleasure of moderating the discussion. On the podium (in nice cushy chairs thanks to a very helpful PayPal facilities guy) were:

• Sudha Jamthe: Social Media Strategist, PayPal
• Felix Sterling: SVP and General Counsel, Trend Micro Inc.
• Ben Parr: Co-Editor, Mashable
• Laura Ramos: Vice President, Xerox
• Jim Delli Santi: CEO, AlikeList

Ben Parr gets credit for my favorite comment: If you think of social media from a tool perspective, you’re going to be the tool…

From Online Slang Dictionary

Many great ideas and comments during the panel, but the tool one most vividly rang true to my systems savvy focus. The idea is that you shouldn’t focus on the technology. The technology is just one piece of the system. Whether your goal is enterprise marketing, personal branding, collaboration for project work or innovation; the technology is the medium, not the message. The panelists kept returning to “know your goal,” “know your audience,” (both where your audience is in the giant social media ecosystem and their skills and preferences), then work to develop organizational or personal practices, leveraging the technology, to reach your goal.

It was a great panel. We covered each of the topics mentioned above and could have talked for hours more. You can see the Twitter stream here and I’ll post a link to the video when it’s available. Would love to hear from people who were in the audience. Feel free to comment below.

Many management books (for example, The First 90 Days, p. 45) suggest that you have structured interviews with your direct reports when you first join a new organization. Eugene Lee followed this advice when he become CEO 2.0 (that’s how Ross Mayfield, one of Socialtext’s founders, advertised the job on LinkedIn) for the collaboration/Enterprise 2.0 platform provider Socialtext. As suggested, he wrote down a set of questions like: how long have you been here, what are you most proud of in your career so far, what will you be most proud of having done when you leave Socialtext?

What’s unique is how this process evolved. He’d scheduled these one-on-one meetings for 30 minutes each and knew that wasn’t much time for people to be thoughtful about their responses — so he posted the list of questions to the company wiki. (A wiki is a website where everyone in the company can post and edit information – and one of Socialtext’s main products.) The idea was to give people a chance to think about the questions before their face-to-face meetings. Eugene didn’t anticipate that given the company’s culture and comfort with social software, like this wiki, that people would just start answering — on the wiki for all to see.

Part of this picture is that Eugene hadn’t come from companies with this kind of transparency. In fact, few companies today are this comfortable with public posts and discussions, and I’m guessing that Cisco and Adobe weren’t during Eugene’s tenure. This public response was a surprise to Eugene: unanticipated, and somewhat unnerving (though he notes that for the Socialtext crew, they wouldn’t have thought of doing it any other way). But here’s the key: Eugene has systems savvy and quickly saw the value of the approach. He didn’t immediately post a recall. He certainly didn’t delete the posts. Instead, he added his own responses.

The wiki posts ended up creating the vision statement (especially the question about what will you be most proud of having done when you leave). There was even a dynamic in that as people were contributing their thoughts, others were “gardening the wiki” — making it a well designed document.

The whole process become something Eugene described as “Getting to Know You 2.0.” Sounds like a beautiful Silicon Valley leadership story. At the time, Eugene notes that it actually felt:

So scary. I’d lost control of the process. How powerful to let that control go…. When you hit a tough spot and need people to do something hard… the trust is enormous… and we make software that helps that.

As a result of the process he was able to prepare a presentation covering: memes, themes, dreams, & seams… what was common, what the aspirations were, and where there were gaps. Getting to Know You 2.0 was a success. It took a combination of technology (the Socialtext platform), organization (a way of working that assumed openness and transparency), and people dimensions (Eugene being accepting of risk, even at this critical juncture with the new company). TOP Management.

This was 2007. Jump forward to the middle of 2009. Eugene got a copy of the book Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor. This book, and his Getting to Know You 2.0 story have become part of how he presents Socialtext’s products to other senior leaders. …and sometimes the transition is stunning.

He recalled a recent sales call with a C-level executive at a large, traditional (the kind of place where the conference room’s mahogany cabinets had mahogany handles), East Coast organization. Some departments in the organization had been using Socialtext social software products and now the question was whether the platform should be offered to the whole company. The meeting was expected to be a private one with the exec and Eugene. Instead, the exec’s staff crashed the meeting and were joined by a top IT exec. Possibly rough meeting, and started out very quietly. The C-level didn’t say a word for 40 minutes, but the end of the presentation he says, “I think we should do this.” The IT exec posed concerns and implied that while this might be good for a California company… “what problem will it solve? Implementations fail when there isn’t a problem being solved.” Pause. The C-level then says “Employee engagement, cross department collaboration.” Maybe this firm’s conference rooms were formal, but this gentleman understood the value of transparency in modern organizations.

Eugene says this story has played out similarly in multiple firms. This transition to transparency is happening and technology is helping to manage the process. He sees this as a leadership issue, the technology is only enabling the interactions. Leaders need to consider:

What does it mean to you, the leader, in terms of not killing transparency? How open book is appropriate? How cross functionally transparent do you really want the culture to be?

Technology, organizations, and people — designed together — TOP Management.

Additional material from my interview with Eugene:
Budget as a Trigger for TOP Management: Examples from Eugene Lee of Socialtext

Eugene Lee is CEO of collaboration/Enterprise 2.0 platform provider Socialtext. His resume includes leadership roles at Adobe, Cisco, and the co-founding of Beyond, Inc. He was kind enough to provide me with several examples of how he’s been able to develop Systems Savvy and how this plays out as TOP Management at Socialtext.

I’m going to start with an example from earlier in his career that may be the easiest for all of us to apply. (I look forward to sharing his “Getting to Know You 2.0″ story in the next week or so.) Eugene had just joined Cisco as VP of marketing for a new business line focused on SMEs [small and medium sized enterprises] and was in one of his first staff meetings with the finance director and other leaders. The presentation went into great detail around financial goals, drill-down goals and the like. Eugene turned to the controller who was helping him through this on-boarding process and asked for more explanation:

The controller was going through the mechanics of headcount, revenue, degrees of freedom, budget, variable marketing spend, allocation stuff… took me through all the lines of a vast spreadsheet. I asked “where’s my IT [information technology] allocation?” “Well, we don’t do that,” says the controller. “Everything is client funded, you decide what you’re going to spend on IT.” At first I didn’t understand.

The major “a ah” was when Eugene realized what it meant in this context that “everything is client funded.” It meant that he had a budget and it was up to him to make choices — across technology, organizations, and people — regarding how he was going to spend the money. This approach created a commitment well beyond that he would expect if there were just an “IT allocation.” It was all about getting the most from your dollar, and getting the most from your dollar doesn’t come from spending on IT independent of the rest of your organizational actions. It has to be a systems approach. It has to be an integration of the technology, the organization, and the people. The budgeting system was a trigger for TOP Management. If you separate out your budget allocations, people will think about the components independently. If instead you budget for a system — you get people to think and design in an integrative way.

I made systems thinking a major part of anything my team did. Raised the bar on what qualified as a fundable program. [Systems thinking] became a theme — and then how we could teach small business to do it at their scale.

The budgeting system also pushed groups across Cisco to collaborate:

Nobody had enough to make a nirvana system on their own, so people would pool resources and you would get alignment across stakeholders. Where the budget comes from plays into creating the conditions, part and parcel, of how the business gets driven.

Eugene said he saw these systems ideas further solidified in how Cisco handled his IT support. The IT Vice President came over to see how he could help. IT: “We need to hire somebody to support your group.” Eugene: “Cool. Who do you have in mind….” IT: “No, you’re going to hire somebody.” The budget money came from IT, but the decisions came from Eugene’s group and the new IT staffer sat (and ate lunch) with Eugene’s team. This “made such a difference. She sat in my building, came to our staff meetings. She could efficiently do the research around what would work and what wouldn’t because she understood the work that needed to get done.”

As a management professor who teaches systems thinking (and hopefully, savvy) in the context of organizational design, these examples sparkled. Cisco had built a budgeting system that clearly supported frugal and effective innovation. Eugene saw it as a way to leverage his resources and this insight served as an effective trigger in his development of systems savvy.

We can all do this — from high corporate finance to departmental budgets — we can use the power of the purse to encourage people to take a systems approach. Managing technology, organizations, and people as a system is likely to be a much more efficient, and effective!, use of limited funds.

I don’t generally make futurist-style statements, but the last two days are begging for one: A big piece of Web 3.0 is going to be the transition from “Live in your In-Box” to “Live in your Browser.” The quote “I live in my in-box” came from a participant in a workshop I co-presented with Scott Schnaars of Socialtext. We were talking about the value and methods of moving from an email centric workflow to one more focused on portals and collaboration workspaces (building from my Kill Email post). The idea isn’t that the work we do while “in our in-box” isn’t valuable — it is real work: we are often communicating about projects, ideas, etc. The idea is that the in-box work carries with it more overhead than the same work would if it were done within a project workspace.

Moving into your browser may be a more efficient place to be, and Gen Y may be there ahead of us. Gen Y doesn’t have to unlearn our (Baby Boomer) email habits.

The other event that pushed me to join the futurists was a discussion I had with Caleb Carter, CEO and Founder of ExistInts. ExistInts joins Google, Facebook, and many others in trying to provide you with a new web home. ExistInts adds a local flavor, while also striving to cross work and social boundaries — smart as many of us have woven our work and social networks and activities together already. Having a “home” that is built to support that model makes sense.

The organizational question is what is the right level? Your social network does provide you work value, and vice versa. These are going to be tied together in our workspace. Should organizations be building portal homes at a company level or at the level of the project? Should individuals be building their own portal homes with rooms for work and play?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nwseaport/ / CC BY 2.0

I feel like we are at the stage of construction where the ground has been cleared and the materials are beginning to arrive. Google is gearing up (pun intended) with Google Wave and the Chrome OS:

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

.. while smaller firms like Socialtext and ExistInts are providing purpose-built capabilities.

We all need to consider what’s going to make the best neighborhood and architecture for getting our work done. I’m sure it’s going to be in the browser. Have you already moved? In my case, I think I’ve moved, but haven’t completely unpacked. Email still makes up the majority of my work communication and my organization has not yet taken the big step to a web-based workflow. Suggestions appreciated from those of you who’ve moved, unpacked, and finished putting up your pictures.