I'm calling shenanigans on 'the $1.3 trillion price of not tweeting at work'

Listen, it's easy to sharp shoot someone else's writing. Especially when you don't know them from a hole in the ground. I generally steer clear of such tomfoolery, but to be honest, I read an article yesterday on FastCompany entitled "The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work" and it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Title inspired by Cow Days episode of South Park

The article derives its outlandish title from the McKinsey report I pointed to last week and wrongly positions a single social platform (Twitter) as equivalent to the broader term "social technologies" used in the report and (wrongly) recasts the estimated value of employing these technologies (in the global market) as the the cost of not tweeting at work.

The proof's in the pudding (here are the first three paragraphs verbatim):

On June 6, Larry Ellison--CEO of Oracle, one of the largest and most advanced computer technology corporations in the world--tweeted for the very first time. In doing so, he joined a club that remains surprisingly elite. Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. Ellison, by the way, hasn’t tweeted since.

As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom. Within the C-suite, perceptions remain that social media is at best a soft PR tool and at worst a time sink for already distracted employees. Without a push from the top, many of the biggest companies have been slow to take the social media plunge.

A new report from McKinsey Global Institute, however, makes the business case for social media a little easier to sell. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. At the high end, that approaches Australia’s annual GDP. How’s that for a bottom line?

If that's not reaching, I'm not sure what is. It probably also worth mentioning that the article's author is the CEO of Hootsuite; meaning that the obvious subtext (at least in my reading) is that Hootsuite can help you get a slice of that juicy $1.3 trillion if only they could meet with your "Twitter-phobic CEOs".

I won't bother with the rest of the article as it offers up little in terms of understanding, applying, or challenging the findings of the McKinsey report. But I do want to close the loop on the issue of just how important (or unimportant) it is for your CEO (or in the public sector your Deputy Minister) to be tweeting.


Whether or not you CEO tweets is completely irrelevant

I could think of a hundred things off the top of my head that are far more important activities for my Deputy Minister to be engaged in than tweeting. In fact, I would position any of the hundred decisions they are likely to make during the course of a week as more important than the decision to tweet or not.  Furthermore, if anyone out there can show me a direct causal relationship between a private sector CEO tweeting and an increase in that firm's revenues (or in the public sector better outcomes) I will gladly eat my hat!


Whether or not your CEO is open to change is paramount

What CEOs (and again by extension heads of public sector agencies) need to be aware isn't how to tweet or why but rather the transformative nature of new communications technologies, how they affect information flows, how they can help the organization tap into it's  cognitive surplus and how the openness they engender disrupts their traditional business models.

Those at the top need to be paying attention to the likes of Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, and, for a healthy dose of scepticism Andrew Keen; not jumping onto Twitter on the advice of profiteering social media hucksters (no offense).


My advice

Don't trust anyone who's selling the sizzle.  Don't throw money at tools before understanding the environment within which they operate.

Always put strategy before tactics and understanding before strategy because understanding informs strategy and strategy informs tactics. This isn't about learning how to blog, wiki or twitter, this is about learning how to be more adaptive to change.

While the former can be easily purchased on every corner of the web, the latter is much harder to come by and as a result will always serve you better in the long run.


Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.ca subscribe/connect

What if I told you I could increase your productivity by 25%?

In July McKinsey released a report entitled The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies. 
The report offers up some interesting findings (many of which are worth noting, so I suggest you read it; but one in particular caught my eye. Here's the excerpt from their dandy of an intro:

"While 72 percent of companies use social technologies in some way, very few are anywhere near to achieving the full potential benefit. In fact, the most powerful applications of social technologies in the global economy are largely untapped. Companies will go on developing ways to reach consumers through social technologies and gathering insights for product development, marketing, and customer service. Yet the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. MGI’s estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals—by 20 to 25 percent."

Read that last sentence again: adopting social technologies could improve the productivity of highly skilled knowledge workers by as much as 25%.
Twenty-five percent. 

The number got me thinking

In an era defined by a global cutbacks to public spending, how much is a 25% productivity increase really worth? 

Could a 25% productivity increase actually offset budget cuts?  

And if so, how much?

Who, if anyone, has thought this through yet? 

I'd really like to have a conversation with them.

Ps - I'm still running my crowdfunding campaign to have my handbook translated, I'd appreciate your support - details here!

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.ca subscribe/connect

It's Puzzling, Isn't It?

An organization is a social arrangement to distribute tasks for a collective goal. The word itself is derived from the Greek word organon, itself derived from the better-known word ergon - as we know `organ` - and it means ‘a compartment for a particular job’. - Wikipedia

We often think that the components of an organization fit together like a puzzle.  Each piece consisting of clearly defined work, interconnected seamlessly to the others around them, forming a coherent whole and framed with rigid and linear boundaries.


But nothing could be farther than the truth

Work is no longer easily compartmentalized; this isn’t an assembly line.  The mental model comes out of an industrial economy and I question its relevance in a knowledge based one.   I would argue that we don’t have soft edges at all, but rather that ...


We are all a little rough around the edges

An increasingly diverse workforce coupled with an increasingly diverse scope of work means our organizational models have to contend with increasingly jagged edges, wider gaps and unforeseen overlaps.  Upon closer reflection, my gut tells me that if we took the time to examine our organizational structures more closely we would find conflict at the jagged edges, delays at the gaps, and duplication at the overlaps.  

We might also find that organizations interested in improving their productivity shouldn't focus narrowly on improving the efficiency of the individuals within the organization, but rather on smoothing the harsh edges between them.  In my mind, that means improving communication between actors (e.g. individuals, organizations, levels of government).  This line of reasoning is based on the argument that productivity gains don't materialize when individuals work harder, but rather when they work better together.  

Clear communication is the key to greater efficiency, and while the diffusion of enabling technologies may help, ultimately it is a culture of communication that will deliver organizations significant improvements to productivity because even the highest performer is undermined by friction at the margins of their work.  
 

This was originally published by Nick Charney on cpsrenewal.ca, feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn or add his blog to your Facebook.

Unproductive Meetings? There Should Be an App For That

"In this world nothing is certain except death and taxes" - Benjamin Franklin

Old Ben was pretty close, but he forgot one crucial element: meetings. We all attend them, we often loath them, we often wonder in hindsight if they were actually worth the time. I'm not trying to say that meetings can't be useful, just that they often aren't, at least in my experience. In fact the more time I spend around the boardroom table, the more I think that there must be a better way to manage meetings within the organization.


Why do we need to rethink meetings?

I can't say for certain if this phenomenon is universal or simply ubiquitous across my own experience, but people tend to think of meetings as just another part of their job; few think of meetings in terms of their costs to either them personally or their organization, happily meandering through directionless meetings.


How do we need to rethink meetings?

Meetings, even internal meetings, aren't free. There is always a cost associated with meeting. Why not build an app that could show participants what the true cost is? Here's a rough outline:

• Meetings could be created by the person setting the agenda.
• Info can be attached to the invitation
• Attendees would check in to the meeting when they accept the meeting
• Their salaries are automatically drawn out of their enterprise employment records (but not divulged to others in the room)
• The convener starts the meeting and projects a running tally of the cost of the meeting as it is being conducted kind of like a taxi meter
• Next to the cost of the meeting is the deliverable cost (e.g. say the meeting is to decide how to allocate a 25k contract)
• Each participants mobile device can concurrently display their own dollar tally as well as a percentage of the total meeting cost.
• The app would also give each participant ongoing cumulative data on how much of their own salary they have eaten up in meetings.
• This data could also be used by the organization as a catalyst for better information sharing (to circumvent or improve the culture of meetings)
  
• All in all the app is designed to shift thinking around the costs of meetings and inform better decision-making when it comes to meetings.

What can we do to rethink meetings?

This app is just a sketch on a whiteboard, but if you are interested in helping me build it, let me know. I'd love to get this one out the door.

Oh an yes I know that it probably will never make money, may actually contradict the science of motivation, but I can think of no other more immediate way to show people that (for hypothetical example) spending 150k in salary dollars determining how to best allocate an under 25k contract may not make sense.

Comic: Productivity

I hope you enjoy my latest web comic. I'm not sure yet if this will become a fixture or not, but I do enjoy doing them. Ideally I want to use them to challenge some of our core assumptions about working in the public sector. This one pretty much sums up today (click image to enlarge):



Ps - I'm also experimenting w/CafePress. If you want you can grab the productivity mug here; proceeds will be donated to the United Way Ottawa.