From Osar Berg - The Content Company - "On several occasions, on this blog and elsewhere, I've discussed why and how culture matters for Enterprise 2.0 to happen. In my most recent posts, I've specifically discussed how certain values and cultural characteristics are pre-requisites for Enterprise 2.0 to happen:

• Why culture comes first and technology second
• Don't expect too much from Enterprise 2.0

If you, like me, are interested in what makes collaboration tick and what it might take besides technologies to make Enterprise 2.0 happen, there are a few readings you should look into.

First, there's a fascinating read by Rob Paterson about the new virtual workplace at IBM. To illustrate the culture shift that is taking place at IBM, he describes how my friend Luis Suarez can control his own time and work space. Location just doesn’t matter as Luis can work from anywhere at any time -be it at an airport, at an office, or at his home in small village on the Canary Islands. This is achieved by making sure he and his fellow 200 000 coworkers at IBM can be connected to each other and any colleague at anytime from anywhere. But technology is just an enabler of the new virtual work place. The key to make the new work place happen is, as Rob puts it, to “stop measuring presence – i.e. punching the clock as at a factory – and to start measuring results and outcomes”. Such a shift requires a real change in corporate values and behaviors.

Another great read is “Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and corporate culture awareness” by Gil Yehuda in which he shares some really good examples and counter examples of supportive cultures to help him make his point:

I say, the path to Enterprise 2.0 is paved on a supportive culture. If you don’t have a supportive culture, it’s nearly impossible to find real success with any social tools (beyond small scale deployments — which may be very successful for your team, but not at the enterprise level).

If you roll it out, don’t expect “they will come”. It’s not that simple. You have to tune into the underlying culture to see if it can support Enterprise 2.0. I believe some companies have a culture unwelcoming to Enterprise 2.0 — at least now. I also believe that in time this will change as a new generation of leadership emerges in the post-recession economy.

The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly anticipate every possible touchpoint that could influence the perception of your company’s brand.

At Zappos.com, we decided a long time ago that we didn’t want our brand to be just about shoes, or clothing, or even online retailing. We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience. We believe that customer service shouldn’t be just a department, it should be the entire company.

So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into building the brand you want? What’s the best way to build a brand for the long term?

In a word: culture."

Here is a report on a survey of 25,000 IBMers. (By the way – I have no connection at all with IBM)

Flexible arrangements and the chance to work from your living room increases productivity so much that workers can carry on for 19 hours more than other employees before feeling any interference with family life.

The findings are based on a study of 24,436 employees of IBM, the technology company, across 75 different countries.

For office-based workers the tipping point at which staff felt that their working life started to interfere with their home life came after 38 hours of work a week.
However, for those offered a flexible working, including from home, the length of time that employees could worked without feeling the pressure was much longer.
On average they could put in 57 hours a week without feeling such a conflict.

The study “Finding an Extra Day or Two” is published in the Journal of Family Psychology. The research team, from Brigham Young University, in Salt Lake City, Utah, identified the point at which a quarter of employees the reported a conflict between work and family life.

Many of the home workers did spend some time working in an office, the study reports. But it was flexibility, including the option to do their job from other places, which allowed them to work for longer than other staff.

Prof E Jeffrey Hill, who led the study, said: “Telecommuting is really only beneficial for reducing work-life conflict when it is accompanied by flexitime.” Prof Hill, who once worked for IBM himself, said: “Managers were initially sceptical about the wisdom of working at home and said things like, ‘If we can’t see them, how can we know they are working?’” But now they are convinced of the benefits, he said.

His study also reports that eight in 10 IBM managers believe that flexible working increases productivity. “A down economy may actually give impetus to flexibility because most options save money or are cost-neutral,” he added. “Flexible work options are associated with higher job satisfaction, boosting morale when it may be suffering.”

More here:

‘Managers were initially sceptical about the wisdom of working at home and said things like ‘If we can’t see them, how can we know they are working?” Hill said.

Nowadays more than 80 percent of IBM managers agree that productivity increases in a flexible environment.

In the current economy, the scenario is being repeated with other businesses feeling the pinch.

‘A down economy may actually give impetus to flexibility because most options save money or are cost-neutral,’ Hill said. ‘Flexible work options are associated with higher job satisfaction, boosting morale when it may be suffering in a down economy.’

The study, titled ‘Finding an Extra Day or Two,’ will appear in the June issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. Study coauthors include BYU School of Family Life professors Jenet J. Erickson and Erin K. Holmes, and Maria Ferris, a retired IBM researcher.

For example:

• The 6 employees in "dining services".  (Dining services!)

• The 4 employees in the "office of the CEO"  (I'm a CEO.  How come I don't have 4 people in my office?  Oh, wait, I have 12 people in my office.  The whole editorial team!)

• The 17 employees in IT.  (What do these 17 folks do, exactly?  Maintain Microsoft Office?  These aren't the folks who build and maintain the web site, by the way. There are another 10 of those.)

• The 19 employees in accounting.

• The 21 employees in manufacturing and distribution (M&D).

• The $102 million the company spent last year manufacturing, distributing, mailing, and managing circulation of the print magazine.  It's worth noting that this was actually a lot less than the the company made from selling the magazine ($80 million) and advertising in the magazine ($70 million).  If there's good news here, in fact, it's that even factoring in the $29 million cost of editorial, the money taken in from the magazine ($150 million) was more than the cost to produce it ($131 million).  Well, unless you count advertising and marketing ($19 million).  And corporate overhead ($55 million).

• And then, yes, the 92 employees in print editorial and the 18 employees in online editorial, and the rest of the publication's 379 employees worldwide.

Here are the detailed financials.  And here's the relevant employee chart from the book:

Isn't this fascinating! Here is the real root of the Print vs Online debate - the costs of the old system. Bloat Bloat Bloat.

I see 3 big areas here. The key to the kingdom is the online - But IT are in charge and they hate this. They are the people who tell you why not. Note the online folks at Newsweek are subservient to IT.

What is the real role today of IT? Is it not to have the most robust network? It is not to have a unique impenetrable kingdom.

What is the world of "Online" - it is to have the most flexible architecture and to embody the editorial context into this.

Then you can rebuild your editorial staff to work in the new global online context - you can curate masses of citizen content and have millions of stringers.

So in the process you can lose the magazine.

Newsweek have a great brand that could really help make this shift. As a citizen how would you feel if your story was in Newsweek?

So how are you doing? What are you really spending your money on? Spending it on killing your media business or in saving it?

We are still trying to fond the way to measure this kind of work. I wonder if this model from the Gauravonomics Blog could be a clue?

Let's look at a simple and current project - Kotex's Campaign to change the conversation and the thinking about a woman's period from a secret nasty thing to being a natural part of any woman and the men in her life's life.

Here is the link to part of their work http://www.ubykotex.com/real_answers/qa

So Kotex have a lot of content on their site - wacky videos that show how embarrassed men are - the Q and A part of the site that the link takes you too - that has the questions that non on wants to ask in public view - on Facebook Jordan asks even more edgy questions such as what pet name do you have for your period.

The result has been a huge outpouring of collaboration - videos, conversations, comments etc. Many women are helping others deal with all sorts of issues.

I see true friendship and so community emerging. Over time Kotex have a good chance of changing the collective western view of the period.

They have used a tampon as a social object!

If they do that then ask yourself how does Kotex then stand as an organization?

I find that this form of animation really helps me follow the narrative like no other.

In the day I was responsible for an annual compensation budget of over $2.0 billion. As we advanced the idea of performance pay we also advanced the idea of focus and control - so we did all of this wrong!

Purpose - Autonomy - Mastery are what guide us. Now if you can deal with the money as a hygiene issue - people have to have enough and it has to be fair - then you have it.

Our whole education system is based on the wrong model! Think about this for a moment.....

We control and we reward (marks) and we punish (marks). The real purpose is to label 70% as stupid. We don't focus on mastery but on ranking. We allow no autonomy.

We don't seek mastery. Take reading - the issue here is being comfortable about reading. That is the goal not the marks. That is a goal that we can all help another get to. It's not a competitive issue. It's a common goal. We all now it when we have reached it. Same with basic maths.

If we made this a common goal all the kids could help each other. Now we would have a purpose that was bigger than any one child. Now inside that we would have room for lots of autonomy.

If we shaped grades 1-3 like this - where we are all going to be able to read well by grade 3 and do core math well it might change everything.

HT to Johnnie Moore who put me onto Viv.

How then to make the shift? I think that the answer is in our food system. For it is how we get our food that shapes our world view and constructs the "fiction" that is how we explain ourselves.

Hunter Gatherers live in small highly local groups and have no property. So the other is over the hill. Early farmers live in larger groups and are mainly peasants because the work demands slaves. Industrial Food demands nations and a new kind of serf.

But if we shift to community based permaculture systems, all the hierarchies shift and cooperation between groups becomes essential.

Speech - written word - printed word - the web amplify the shift.

Fire - muscle - fossil fuel(solar capital) - solar income energize it

Fear Is the Mind Killer – Mind Set and Adoption

by Rob Paterson

May 19, 2010 at 7:45 am · Filed under Adoption, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV 

We have intuitively known for ages that the gateway to a 2.0 world – a world of participation and real partnership – is not merely the adoption of a new set of tools – but the mindset of the influencers in the organization. Now we know that this is an empirical fact.

In 2009 I was advising KETC, a public TV station in St Louis, as they tried a something truly novel. The Station had in its own market just completed a project funded by CPB, to see if it could use its Trust to convene the community to help each other get through the Mortgage Crisis. The challenge being that St Louis was locked down with fear and shame and it was all but impossible to find safe sources of help. The project was to find out who could be trusted and to help them set up a network of support and to connect this to the people. It forced the station to itself work across the silos and to connect TV with the web and with its outreach. The success of this experiment caused CPB to fund a much bigger test. 32 of the hardest hit markets in America were chosen. In each market CPB asked the TV and the Radio stations to partner and the entire group partnered as a group. Again the task was to reach into the community, to find those who could help, help them partner and to connect them to the people.

Here is a link to the full details of the project. We were in effect using the Mortgage Crisis as a Social Object.

View Facing the Mortgage Crisis, Participating Stations and Markets in a larger map
Here is a map of the scale of the work. If you expand it you will see the names of the stations.

So what happened? What happened is that some stations did brilliantly. Some did ok and others went through the motions. What was the difference? We found that the difference had nothing to do with any tools – we all used the same ones and we ll helped each other use them. No the Difference was mindset. The Mindset of the leadership of our a group of leaders at each station.

We were able to categorize the stations as you see in this chart. Here is more detail of what these categories mean. I offer it up because you can assess your own organization by using this screen.

Tier 1

• The station knows that they must shift their work patterns and focus on the external—they have a positive and open mindset

• They seek to shift their norms—despite what resources are available to make this shift

• Core beliefs inside the station have shifted and there is an emotional attachment between the station and the people they serve

• Communication is strong internally and externally

• Internal collaboration has become the norm, silos are minimized

• They are able to utilize all of their assets, leveraging the broadcast component and maximizing social and online media, community involvement and partnerships

• They listen first to their partners and their community, and they understand the value of these relationships in helping define a course of action for their work

• They are able to take direction from their community advisors and have a willingness to cede control of certain aspects to other organizations.

• Station leadership is strong and backs the work directly or makes certain that key staff are supported

• Relationship between TV and Radio is secure (where applicable).  Both organizations experience the benefits of working together to help their community

Tier 2

• Internal collaboration is emerging and is valued, silos are beginning to minimize

• They’ve made relative progress from where they started and very much want to make the leap, but don’t have the capacity, skill set, people or road map to shift their focus beyond the traditional work.

• They’re beginning to make the leap from station at the center to ceding control to partners

• They are exploring what social media and online can mean to their work

• Station leadership wants to make the leap to this new kind of work, but the shift is nascent

• Relationship between TV and Radio (where applicable) is improving

Tier 3

• They think they’ve done this before, but do not understand the nuances of why this work is different

• Staff work in silos, but collaborate ad hoc

• Still working through old processes/norms

• Station leadership is supportive, but invested in traditional work and won’t alter investments to new work

• Little or no collaboration between TV and Radio

Tier 4

• Regard this as just another project with funds attached—a beginning and an end—rather than a capacity builder

• Traditional approach with station at the center

• Unable to form meaningful and equal partnerships with community organizations—station is still very much in control

• Use social media very little and do not leverage multi-platform—broadcast is still only priority

• Station leadership regards this as business as usual

• Staff work in silos

These characteristics are meaningful—they are not simply an assessment of how the stations performed in this initiative.  The characteristics of the top performing stations help us understand how to make the shift to public media.  These characteristics are the key to making the case for the relevance and significance of public media in our communities and in our country.  This is the case for the sustainability of our industry.

MINDSET = IMPACT = SUSTAINABILITY

The evidence is clear—Tier 1 stations generated more external grant resources, dedicated more staff, forged more partnerships, hosted more discussions — on-air and online—produced more reports, and spurred more talk in their communities.  This in turn had big implications for community outcomes in terms of citizen resource utilization and other media attention—meaning more calls were generated to 211 in these communities and there was more media coverage beyond the station.

Later I will post more about our findings but I wanted to get the mindset issue on the table.

 

My dear pals who work with me here on Fast Forward Blog will chip in. Where is the leverage – who has to get it and how do they get it. How do you move up? What are the barriers?

 

More soon

 

 

MIAMI — Meaghan Patrick, a junior at New College of Florida, a tiny liberal arts college in Sarasota, says discussing immigration with her older relatives is like “hitting your head against a brick wall.”

Cathleen McCarthy, a senior at the University of Arizona, says immigration is the rare, radioactive topic that sparks arguments with her liberal mother and her grandmother.

“Many older Americans feel threatened by the change that immigration presents,” Ms. McCarthy said. “Young people today have simply been exposed to a more accepting worldview.”

Forget sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; immigration is a new generational fault line.

In the wake of the new Arizona law allowing the police to detain people they suspect of entering the country illegally, young people are largely displaying vehement opposition — leading protests on Monday at Senator John McCain’s offices in Tucson, and at the game here between the Florida Marlins and the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Meanwhile, baby boomers, despite a youth of “live and let live,” are siding with older Americans and supporting the Arizona law.

This emerging divide has appeared in a handful of surveys taken since the measure was signed into law, including a New York Times/CBS News poll this month that found that Americans 45 and older were more likely than the young to say the Arizona law was “about right” (as opposed to “going too far” or “not far enough”). Boomers were also more likely to say that “no newcomers” should be allowed to enter the country while more young people favored a “welcome all” approach.

The generational conflict could complicate chances of a federal immigration overhaul any time soon. “The hardening of this divide spells further stalemate,” said Roberto Suro, the former head of the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.

And the causes are partly linked to experience. Demographically, younger and older Americans grew up in vastly different worlds. Those born after the civil rights era lived in a country of high rates of legal and illegal immigration. In their neighborhoods and schools, the presence of immigrants was as hard to miss as a Starbucks today.

In contrast, baby boomers and older Americans — even those who fought for integration — came of age in one of the most homogenous moments in the country’s history.

Immigration, which census figures show declined sharply from the Depression through the 1960s, reached a historic low point the year after Woodstock. From 1860 through 1920, 13 percent to 15 percent of the country was foreign born — a rate similar to today’s, when immigrants make up about 12.5 percent of the country.

But in 1970, only 4.7 percent of the country was foreign born, and most of those immigrants were older Europeans, often unnoticed by the boomer generation born from 1946 to 1964.

Boomers and their parents also spent their formative years away from the cities, where newer immigrants tended to gather — unlike today’s young people who have become more involved with immigrants, through college, or by moving to urban areas.

“It’s hard for them to share each others’ views on what’s going on,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. “These older people grew up in largely white suburbs or largely segregated neighborhoods. Young people have grown up in an interracial culture.”

My son James is 30 and grew up in a fully multi racial Toronto. 57 languages were spoken at his school. His wife is Korean. He only sees people.

Their children will be hard to categorize too.

Two cultures are emerging - hard to cross the line for both.

What is your experience?

The more you raise the stakes, the worse people do - the more you focus on THE plan - the worse you do - the more you use play and prototyping and allow for small fails - the better.

Big lesson for me recently.