As “ideal types” of coordination 

(that is, getting things done through groups) we often hear about Networks as polar opposites of Hierarchy.  Networks are flat, egalitarian, flexible, and emergent, while Hierarchy is vertical, oligarchic, rigid, and prescribed by the powers-that-be.   The two forms are not so much locked in a death struggle for dominance, however, as they are co-existing at the same time in a complex overlay.

Looking for a concrete example?  Consider the regime of Saddam Hussein, up to and including the US-Iraq war beginning in 2003.  A 5 minute video from Slate magazine  reveals how social networks ran alongside the formal government structure, and how US forces used network analysis to track down and capture Saddam.

Abstracting away from Iraq, there are some general principles of Networks vs. Hierarchy that come through loud and clear from this example. 

1. do not confuse networks of influence, knowledge, power with a formal organization chart ... they may overlap, but are of great interest where different.
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2. the inner circle takes care of its own as shown in Art Kleiner’s, Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success.  
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3. personal networks in some cases may be even stronger than the formal ones (e.g. secrets, deep loyalties, status markers)
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4. from Saddam's POV, Weak Ties (to a wider circle) may bring fresh non-redundant info, but Strong Ties (four intertwined families from Tikrit, with long shared history) are your fallback under stress
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5. from the US Intel / Army POV, the key was creating a "bridge" to the mystery "Fat Man," converting him to a Weak Tie for the US forces, while this bodyguard remained a Strong Tie to Saddam
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Jumping now to a very different context, the combination of Weak and Strong Ties is the same way radical Innovation works.   See the research of Harvard Business School professor Lee Fleming, using network structure (graph theory) to understand the productivity of R&D or Open Sourcing for breakthrough innovation. [link].  The Weak Tie brings in the radical new ideas, but the strong ties of existing "cluster" of researchers allows in-depth testing, vetting, development of an idea, and fast diffusion within the cluster.  In Fleming's argument, you need both the Weak Tie and the Cluster.   Either one alone will not deliver the breakthrough, you need both.

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Anticipate the arguments of your critics

"What does not kill me, makes me stronger." -- 

                                                            Friedrich Nietzsche, 

Twilight of the Idols, 1888

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The Attack: A Progression of Gates

§        does E-2.0 have a powerful coalition of internal support from enterprise leaders, for shelter and nurture during its vulnerable beginnings?  Have corporate ‘gatekeeper’ functions of IT, Legal, HR, and Corporate Communications been consulted early, brought inside the tent? 

§        is there an explicit business case for E-2.0 implementation?  If viewed as a ‘strategic investment’ (no ROI required), do you have a clear idea of what business outcomes you want to emerge?   What are you trying to do?  Are the expectations set at a reasonable level?

§        let W = the sum of all time, energy, attention, and money wasted on E-2.0, to include personal uses, goofing off, learning curves for each flood of gizmos.  (W for waste.)  The total time, energy, and money expended, less W, we can call “legit business use” (LBU)

§        (ever wonder what ratio W / LBU is? ... Oops, negative thinking)

§        note LBU at this stage is simply activity level, not outcomes

§        usage stats (first level metrics of LBU) = activity, are not convincing that E-2.0 is worthwhile, let alone the NBET (Next Big Enterprise Thing).  If the task at hand is to generate ideas, e.g., we have to ask if the ideas are redundant, are novel, are valuable.

§        some sub-set of LBU is effective at generating a value, or business outcome.  If ideas, they are good non-redundant ideas.  Good, but we are not yet talking about a NET benefit, because thus far we are not counting [often not able to count] the costs, including opportunity costs (production you would otherwise have accomplished in that time, and the time of the people you “network” with)

§        even the flow that passes this gate, i.e. where we can show a Net business benefit, we do admit you could be solving a problem, but not yet an Important Problem ... perhaps the business value created is not aligned to our strategy, and will not be implemented

§        or, we agree you could be advancing the ball for an Important Problem, but not in a noticeably effective or efficient way.   "We'd rather do it with email." 

§        or your proposal bid team has efficiently located and re-used knowledge from a previous client project, and saved time, but the resulting lack of originality weakens the quality of the bid.  Re-cycled content signals low regard for current client, so you lose the engagement.  [Haas & Hansen, 2007]

§        or you could be successful at augmenting flow of new ideas into the innovation funnel but, "Sorry, we do that part very well already!" ... the unmet need is downstream commercialization of ideas.   Your invention is adding to our burden, not reducing it.

§        you could be increasing dramatically the capability for collaboration, but the barrier was willingness to collaborate, not capability, and the motivation has not changed [Morten Hansen]

§        Yes, you are running an experiment with E-2.0, but with no controls, no metrics, just stories. Thanks, but we know the odds of success in organization change are 20-40% to begin with, and we had lots of (unrepresentative) stories before you got here.

The Defense:

Ben Franklin Defense

“Of what use is a new baby?” 

(Attributed to old Ben, when asked what practical use there was for newfangled electricity.)

Bob Dylan Defense

“You better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changing"

Knowledge Worker Puzzle Defense

If I could measure the ROI of knowledge workers with scientific rigor, I would win the Nobel Prize next year, because no one else has been able to do it.

Knowledge Worker Defense, Part II

Knowledge workers do assert their independence, but well designed E-2.0 is emergent, frictionless, freeform [McAfee], so the voluntarism of helpful tools becomes an attractive menu, not forced compliance.   Professionals guided by their own strong values will adaptively seek out high Quality, efficient Time savings, both the image and reality of competence.  [separate K-work dimensions, Haas and Hansen]

Satchel Page Defense

(“Don’t look back, somebody may be gaining on you.”)

If you wait to see what the competition is doing, it will be too late.

Fast to Fail Defense

Yes, a lot of new initiatives fail.  Capitalism is all about “creative destruction” and survival is Darwinian.  The future belongs to those who can evolve and adapt Fast.  ‘No worries’ about the failure rate, the winners make up for it.  [see Clay Shirky]

Counter-Attack Defense

Oh? You want to examine a waste of time?   Just how productive are the endless meetings around here?   What’s the ROI on your first class seat for dubious travel?  How about the business logic behind you arranging tee times with your golf buddies, eh?

Batting Average Defense

So what is the success rate of enterprise-wide software in your domain?  CRM?  SAP? BI?  Big bang IT seems to meet expectations about 20-40% of the time, and that's after huge ROI justification studies, and a price tag in hundreds of millions!  The E-2.0 suites are very inexpensive, and once installed are "general purpose technologies" that contribute in many ways, not highly specialized applications that are bolted to the floor, inflexible.

Organization Change Defense

Yes, this is a hard game to play and win, as to large scale behavioral change.  Our odds of success go up as we iterate our learning loops, reserve budget for extended training, allow systems to adapt / evolve to meet emerging user needs.  [see Peter Senge for Systems Thinking; see McAfee for “the long haul.”]

Neutrality of Tools Defense

Social software platforms and apps are just neutral tools.  They serve as enablers, accelerators, and potential lures into productivity. ‘What is the ROI of your cell phone?’  Nobody said the tools alone would transform a culture of not-sharing, not-borrowing. [And good luck changing a culture.]

Intrinsic Rewards Defense

With possible exception of crowd-sourcing a new business product, do not get distracted into monetary incentives for motivating collaboration.   Homo sapiens is already hard-wired to collaborate if you remove the barriers.  More to the point, extrinsic rewards have a terrible track record of unintended consequences.   If people need extra motivation to do their jobs, maybe we need to fire them, get some different people.

Reverse Engineering Defense

With guidance from our exec steering group, we selected three target areas for high impact demonstration projects in E-2.0.   Then we reasoned backwards to imagine how E-2.0 tools and processes might assist us meet goals.  That is where we are concentrating our efforts.   We are looking for Evidence, not Proof.

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Cisco Systems and IBM                 

have experimented successfully with crowdsourcing, with enough common results to suggest trends, and enough differences to spark further investigation.  The Cisco story (fall 2007) was the subject of a recent Harvard Business Review article, and the IBM experience (summer and fall 2006) was treated in the Sloan Management Review.   Both articles are recommended if your firm is considering a large scale crowdsourced innovation project.   

Do not underestimate the sheer complexity and large time demands on senior management, as both Cisco and IBM seem to have done.

The Cisco project was an external (open to public) innovation contest with $250,000. cash prize to the single winner.   The objective was "to find an idea that would spawn a new billion-dollar Cisco business."  Twenty-five hundred innovators participated,  putting forward 1,200 separate ideas.  

 The IBM Innovation Jam was somewhat more restricted in reach, open to employees, families, business partners, clients (67 firms), and university researchers.   Their objective was to speed the development of existing IBM technologies from a list of 25 clusters and create new businesses of substantial size.  It was not a case of a single winner, but Chairman Palmisano promised $100 million in funding for up to ten new business units.   No cash prize was mentioned, although normal IBM IPRs and rewards may have been in operation.  The total number of participants was said to be 150,000 and tens of thousands of postings were generated in a three day nonstop Jam.

Beyond the design and scope differences, the IBM Innovation Jam revealed a few behaviors that vary from the Cisco experience. 

IBM Jam was

• not so collaborative: IBMers did not build upon ideas of others, to such an extent that the Second Round of the process has been dropped from their model.   Cisco on the other hand found 70% of the final 40 ideas did benefit from teams pooling ideas
• Why the difference?   Good question.   Perhaps the cash prize came into the practical decision to combine forces with others who had valuable bits to add to your own.
• largely confirming existing processes: most ideas had already been raised to IBM management, but there was still seen to be added benefit to IBM for the visibility, recombination, and refinement of ideas in the Jam round of examination

Similarities: both Cisco and IBM found

• idea generation is “the easy part” ... the fun part
• management process is “not cheap” ... it is ponderous, time-consuming to filter, guide, develop biz case, and assess ideas
• hybrid human-machine processes are needed in filtering
• voting is not a reliable filter, the most attention grabbing ideas ("promote votes") were not necessarily the most robust, practical, or business compatible; Comments were much more valuable, in part because the expertise of the commenter would become apparent
• live, interactive meetings are required with contributors in final steps, either face-to-face (IBM) or Virtual Presence (Cisco)

Unlike small group and face-to-face brainstorming, there was little sense of excitement, the discovery-in-the-moment.  Rather, it was in both cases a drawn-out period of filtering, analysis, guidance and training loops in how ideas translate to business cases, and repeat refinement.  The process was described as ponderous, and somewhat painful in sheer time and complexity.

Neither Cisco nor IBM saw crowdsourcing as an exercise in workplace democracy.   Decision making on the value of ideas, and the winnowing process down to the winners, was firmly in the control of senior management.

Cost to download pdf of Cisco story in HBR (Reprint R0909C) is $6.95, same as for IBM Jam in MIT Sloan Mgmt Review (Reprint No. 50101).  Links are given above.

Does your company use crowdsourcing?  Just how far can the software take you, before you need human intervention?   Is it valuable enough, over the obvious huge time demands, that senior management would like to do it again?    Once every __ how many years?   Do you use monetary incentives?   share royalty rights?   Or just go with the reputation effect and "bragging rights?"    Leave a comment.

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is notoriously difficult.  The business sector might seem a promising domain for partnering arrangements, based on long history and the obvious shared motives in competitive advantage. At least in theory, business combinations offer the prospect of increased economies of scale, broader geographic reach, wider product portfolios, complementary market positions, and filling gaps in organization capability. 

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 Recommendation:  five stars 

Author Ken Auletta [see wikipedia neutral POV bio] has written extensively on communications and 'The New Media' since 1992.   Auletta gained deep and wide access to Google to construct a book about digital business, aggressive techno-leadership, and the Creative Destruction of old media business models.

At the surface, this is 21^st Century corporate history: the inside story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, from Stanford to garage startup, to Mountain View colossus. 

• very light on search algorithms, zero on data mining
• good on egalitarian/ elitist / naive geek culture, straight out of grad school
• heavy on historical narrative, one chapter per year

 Written with open cooperation of Larry, Sergey, CEO Eric Schmidt and 150 current and former employees, the book is chock full of anecdotes, incidents, and attributed quotes.  Interviews with Silicon Valley icons Marc Andreessen, John Doerr, Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg, Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd, add welcome critical distance, so the history is not simply a PR puff piece.  You could spice up a lot of leadership courses with excerpts and stories from this book, and I am sure many consultants will do just that.

At a second level, the book is an in-depth examination of technological disruption: old media floundering and groping its way blindly with new digital media.  Ken Auletta is a well regarded author of books (eight) and New Yorker columns (since 1992) in the communications revolution.  He himself is a product (hero?) of the old print culture, and longtime observer of the media industries: advertising, movies, books, newspapers, and music.  Auletta is most sure-footed in the inside baseball interviews with media moguls, ad execs, TV network mavens.   The business model in the good old days was built on expensive advertising of dubious value, sold by fast talking salesmen on commission.  (Hence the famous quip, “Half my marketing money is wasted ... if I only knew which half.”)   In a crisp Fortune Mag article, Auletta has identified the ten key lessons he finds for modern digital business, coming out of the Google success. 

The subtitle of Googled, “The End of the World as We Know It,” applies quite well to the world of old media.  The arrival of AdWords and AdSense was totally disruptive in transparency, total cost, and most dramatically in efficiency: you only pay for click-through traffic from real consumers.   The geek love of efficiency just dis-intermediated the bulk of the advertising industry, and for some firms, threatened the need for an internal sales force.   The college kids from Google “are messing with the magic,” in the words of the old line media players.  

With the narrow focus of “what is the most efficient way to do X ?” the Google engineers do not ask, nor particularly care, what happens to the existing incumbents, markets, employees, business models in the industry that now does X.  For all the wonderment of (no cost) G-mail, Google Images, YouTube, Google Voice, Google Books, and the search engine itself, it is the revenue gushers of AdWords and AdSense that drive the profitability of Google.

 At the highest level, Googled touches on a range of public policy issues:

• implications of massive databases for user / consumer privacy
• Google Search appears free to users ($$) but is not free (surrender of info)
• copyright issues for book authors, publishers [recommended readings here]
• contingent issues of long term incentives for creative work
• concentration of information power, economic power, in un-regulated markets
• anti-trust boundaries as a public good, despite proven engineering efficiency
• trust in Google altruism, for now and for the long haul, when corporate heirs and assigns may represent very different individuals and interests

 The well documented engineering culture of Google, carefully embedded and nurtured from its earliest days, does have characteristic strengths that have brought society many good things, and brought significant wealth to a number of Googlers.  At the same time, the single-minded worship at altar of efficient solutions made Google blind to its exposure in government, regulation, and public policy.   Like Microsoft before it, Google is forced to make up for lost time in this broader game.   Recent events in the freedom of search in China, and the lack of support when Google turned to its industry frenemies, illustrate the choppy waters ahead for such a huge player in global consumer affairs.

 Weaknesses in the book?   At least one reviewer has asked (and the chrono format of Googled does invite the question), “So what is next?  Where are we headed?”  Auletta is cautious here, and rightly so.   “The questions [re. future] are more apparent than the answers.”   A serious gating factor is whether existing content owners use their copyright positions to partner with Google, or join forces against it (Chapter 13).   As to drivers, Google is credited as a ‘maker of waves’ and not just ‘a rider of waves.’  [p. 281ff.] 

Google has enormous potential to make and re-make markets:  Google Earth & Maps, G-mail, Google Finance, Google Docs and the cloud next time, Google Finance ... the list goes on.  The speed, ubiquity, accuracy of search alone has transformed everyday life and will continue to do so as search rapidly moves to mobile platforms.   But as for Google's current string of products, the company has yet to figure out a workable business model for each [ p. 335].  A little modesty is a good idea until we know more.

The book helps outline the playing field as to public policy, envy of business rivals, new disruptive waves lurking in new garages in Silicon Valley, but otherwise is wary of sweeping prognostications.  Ken leaves the fate of humbled old media, surging new media, Google as a maturing and no-longer-small firm, as an emerging drama.   He is wise to do so, in light of the quick rise and fall of Lycos, Netscape, AOL, and before that DEC.   ‘Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.’ [Niels Bohr]

On a personal basis, I wish Auletta would have taken us one level deeper into the algorithms that power targeted ads, the gold in huge databases extracted by data mining.   Show me the magic and (a bit of) how it works.   That may be asking too much of a generalist book, however, and in any event may not be reasonable for Google to reveal much in this core competency.  

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The new age of collaboration is a compelling idea, well presented by Clay Shirky (NYU), Andy McAfee (MIT), et. al. in the web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 field.   I do buy into the idea that our mass culture is moving toward a level of networked connectedness and co-creation that is unparalleled in the span of HSS (homo sapiens sapiens).   Pretty heady stuff.   

The economics and the physics of modern digital networks would, by themselves, change the Supply / Demand curves radically, and therefore the tradeoffs behind human behavior.   In the present case the trends are even stronger, aided and abetted by the social drives hard wired into us.  The studies of behavioral economics, game theory, psychology, and sociology all support this conclusion.  So, all hail the social software!

But then ... "Hang on a second."    The value of Weak Ties, distant colleagues, knowledge networks in general is the availability of non-redundant insights, information, knowledge.  In many cases, this flood of new ideas does not come indexed, codified, pre-qualified as to accuracy, or with any quality assurance as to process.   In short, you have a ton of new found Differences, with the current reality or future seeds of dispute, contradictions, ambiguity, and conflict.    Who gets to sort out the mess?  Who has the time?  You?   Who is adequately trained and skilled to be the arbiter of "the Truth?"

Thinking of Collaboration as an age-old pursuit, long before our digital network age, was collaboration eagerly sought as a first option?   Or in fact do we not see Collaboration as a last resort?   Or somewhere in between, depending upon the complexity about to be unleashed?

Letting the contrarian horses out of the barn,  see them run a ways:

• business execs typically avoid partnering with someone else, even another division of their own enterprise, if they can possibly do it themselves
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• reluctance to partner or collaborate is not simply a matter of ego and grasping after sole possession of cash bonus: research is overwhelming that mergers, alliances, partnering of different kinds is terribly risky and prone to failure (see separate post)
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• motivation for "going it alone" might include the complexity of collaboration, problems of accountability,  the loss of speed that comes from unity of command, the loss of focus when you lose simplicity, or enough self-knowledge to detect the firm has poor conflict management skills
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• project teams of 6-7 people, aren't they most likely to Collaborate to find and import knowledge?  But  aren't they unlikely to create new dependencies of consultation, cooperation, and joint decision-making unless they have no option?

It seems fair to say the benefits of collaboration do not fall down upon us as the gentle rain from heaven.   The benefits arrive when one or more conditions apply:

      a) complexity is very low, e.g. voluntary flow of suggestions, with no expectation of continuity or obligation

      b) established patterns, protocols, habits have controlled complexity through clear expectations

      c) an outside threat, the cost of not cooperating, is high and evident

      d) key parties have good skills in Conflict Management

All roads [well, most roads] lead to Conflict and Conflict Mgmt.

How good is your firm at sustaining good relationships through Conflict?   Neither submerge, deny and fudge it, on the one hand, nor Go Nuclear and start eye-gouging on the other?   I wonder if orgzn capacity at conflict mgmt correlates well with Innovation capability?

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Beware Using "Collaboration" as a blanket term for all of Enterprise 2.0 -- it is not a synonym

The choice of just the right words is of great importance to understanding, as philosophers remind us, and scholars fret over.  The naming of something has been known to be a sacred and magical act, from the Stone Age forward.   So the struggles with vocabulary and definition in our field are not just amusing mud wrestling over brand and trademark (think $$), they signal the most fundamental pursuit of meaning and application.

Andy McAfee of MIT Sloan first coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" in his seminal SMR article in 2006.    He has been shaping and sifting the field ever since, paying close attention to language, in his influential blog and now with the release of a new book.   Members of the 2.0 Council will soon find a copy of Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges (HBS Press) in their hand, if they do not have it already. (You can peek here.)

Gil Yehuda is another blogger and consultant in E-2.0 who writes on the importance of using the right words, native to your audience, to create shared understanding (and influence clients) in this space.

Cisco Systems has adopted the term "Collaboration" to stand for what we call Enterprise 2.0, i.e. the sum of

• wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and other tools 
• practical human activities they enable
• two-way content creation & publication
• broad meritocratic participation 
• all delivering business value through the speed, simplicity, ubiquity of the modern internal network    

Cisco has published a thoughtful glossy [free download] brochure offering an outline framework for firms to customize their own design and deployment.  

Why choose "Collaboration" to stand for E-2.0 ?  

Presumably because "collaboration"

• sounds less geeky than E-2.0
• is not a neo-logism
• carries a raft of positive connotations [productivity] to business ears
• works well as a marketing and PR image
• avoids the "social" label, which we would all do well to ditch in speaking with our management, as Andy McAfee points out

We do not need to fear an extended theological dispute over terminology.  Practitioners won't spare the time.  It does seem necessary, however, to put a few stakes in the ground for 2.o Council deliberations.  It helps confirm we know what we are talking about.   In so doing we may or may not delineate some boundaries and sketch use cases of 2.0 in general.

Proposal: When we are speaking with (a) our mothers; (b) small children; and (c) corporate managers, we follow Cisco and use "collaboration" to mean Enterprise 2.0.    At some cost in precision, we gain a lot of reach, brevity and goodwill.   

ergo >>> When facing outward only, use "Collaboration."

On the other hand, when specialists and advocates of 2.0 are meeting with one another, we can and should aspire to more clarity and nuance.   There are several verbs / phrases we might choose that do not carry the meaning of collaboration ("working together on a common task").   See [free download] Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence, by MIT Prof. Tom Malone, Rob Laubacher, Chrys Dellarocas.  

Inside what we think of as 2.0, for example, but outside of collaboration, you might be 

• building collective intelligence by aggregation (no other human in the loop)
• lurking and extracting, one-sided only, when the pieces (mostly) are independent
• retrieving persistent copy of someone else's prior collaboration
  (the info donor / expert still does not know you exist)
• converting weak ties to informal networks in anticipation of future collaboration
• participating in a contest to solve a problem  (i.e. competing, not cooperating)
• joining Linked-In as a lark, in vague hope it might pay dividends someday
• writing a blog when no one reads it
• tagging content incorrectly, reducing the collective intelligence on our planet
• selling your car, or Where-to-go-for-drinks-Friday
• voting in a prediction market (does collaboration hinge on intent?)
• voting inappropriately in a market, as a goof, to sabotage the result

ergo >>> With peers, let's NOT default to "Collaboration"

Does this suggested dual-track language make sense?  Can you be said to be collaborating with someone else, when you don't know you are?  When you are competing with them? What of emergent knowledge, e.g. from prediction markets, without specific intention?  Does the word "social" have uniformly bad vibes in your hierarchy?   Are there other actions that fall under Enterprise 2.0 that should be distinguished from "collaboration" in your view?    Leave a comment.

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