OK, here’s the second set of the areas of Openness.

Thanks to some great feedback from Pete Burden there are now 9 areas, as I’ve added Competition which is an interesting dynamic in the mix.

Let me know what you think!

——

5. Environment

As we all wake up to the huge environmental challenges ahead of us, so the role of businesses in the creation and solution of those challenges quite rightly comes into focus. In fact, if there is any reason why we need business to evolve, it is to address the environmental challenges we have ahead of us.

Openness will play a substantial role here: governments and activists will continue to use visibility and profile to influencer businesses to change and as the world takes the environment more seriously, this will be increasingly impactful; and secondarily, progressive businesses that make changes sooner than their competition (whether driven by a Purpose of Significance or in response to the influences and changes in their market) will promote their strengths and gain competitive advantage.

Carbon Disclosure Project

An example of this is the Carbon Disclosure Project, a brilliant and well-connected organisation  headquartered in London with regional offices around the world that ‘launched to accelerate solutions to climate change and water management by putting relevant information at the heart of business, policy and investment decisions’. In other words, using the power of Openness to drive a change in behaviour of corporations. CDP creates this openness by inviting businesses to complete an annual questionnaire about their emissions, water management and climate change strategies.

Responding to the questionnaire is voluntary but one of CDPs great insights has been that a failure on behalf of businesses to manage these aspects of their operations would represent a threat to their future business success, in a world where a business that is not environmentally sustainable will become a business that is not economically sustainable, and in doing so CDP has gained the interest of the institutional investment community who increasingly demand that the corporations which they invest in begin to positively manage the sustainability of their business. As such, CDP creates demand from the investors for transparency from the companies which they have shareholdings in, which in turn drives up the profile and importance of such information inside the businesses.

Walmart

Whereas CDP could be said to be operating from the top down, there are also initiatives driving greater openness and transparency around environmental impacts bubbling from the bottom up: one is initiatives like Patagonia’s Common Threads programme which we looked at earlier, whilst another which has had huge impacts in the sustainability of business has been Walmart’s massive moves towards becoming a greener business.

Amongst an interesting and positive heap of initiatives it has created since 2005, perhaps the most open of its sustainable practices has been the creation of Sustainable Value Networks. As Walmart says on its website: ‘SVNs bring together leaders from our company, supplier companies, academia, government, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs.) Together, we explore challenges develop solutions that benefit our business, as well as our local and global communities.’

Effectively, the SVNs are a vehicle to allow Walmart to invite in some of its biggest critics from activist groups and NGOs, bring in brains and perspectives from academia and government and also – vitally – draw in its supply chain too. These Networks have the responsibility and scope to simultaneously substantially reduce the environmental impact of Walmart business AND drive down costs in the business. The range is broad: SVNs span in focus from Greenhouse Gas to Chemical Intensive Products.

The brilliance of Walmart’s SVNs is their configuration − this really is openness at work, the opening up of a single-organisation’s ‘monoculture’ to greater diversity of ideas and values.

6. Marketing and communications

In the famous words of comedian Bill Hicks at a stand up gig ‘if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself’. He continues: ‘You are satanspawn, filling the world with violent garbage..’.  Marketing and communications has a huge opportunity in the 21st, and it is not just to cease being satanspawn!

Unfortunately, too often, those in marketing and PR were the creators of opacity – obfuscating and obscuring simple, easy-to-access truths like the fat or salt in a food product, or the true cost of a financial services product, or coaching the CEO to evade difficult questions in interviews, instead droning away at their key messages, disrespecting their interviewers and their audiences.

Alternatively, marketing has been too late and too lacking in influence to substantially improve the given product or service: it has been the recipient of the finished article, told only to ‘get it out there’ and so it has lobbed freshly packaged products over the corporate wall, bombarding those on the other side with a hail of incoming messages. “INCOMING!”.

What is more, marketers stand accused of creating aspirational expectations for the average Joe that leave him or her feeling miserable with what they really have. They – the argument goes – created the demand for the shiny car, the puffy lips and the orange skin, for the expensive mountain bikes (plural), the two foreign holidays a year. Which led in turn to the spiral of over-borrowing, of credit card debt and general financial woes.

Marketing in the last century was an industrialized process of shoving stuff into the world. There wasn’t a great deal of dialogue, there wasn’t a great deal of participation and there wasn’t – by the end of the century – a great deal of love or respect for Marketing with a capital M.

That ethos of marketing will not cope with the challenges and changes of the 21st century. It just won’t pass.  The opportunity for marketing today is in harnessing this momentum towards greater openness. Here are some examples of how.

Customer service as marketing

In an open and connected world, consumers and businesses experiences of the products and services they buy are no longer isolated. There is no longer a kind of asymmetry in the power between the provider and the consumer because as you will know well, within minutes of finishing a meal – or even during, if you so wish – you can leave a review of a restaurant that will be findable through Google. The power is more balanced now: if tens of customers have bad experiences of a tradesperson or a lawyer, or if tens of thousands of businesses have bad experiences of an energy company or a government department, they can interlink, aggregate into a more formidable whole and distribute ‘the truth’ about company X far and wide.

This creates a new imperative for marketers which I believe is already making business better: the imperative to take customer service more seriously than ever before.

As such, customer service is an integral part of the new marketing.

The winning marketers will celebrate the potential of reviews, they will create word-of-mouth through outstanding customer experiences, they will create cultures and processes that imbue their employer’s with customer-centricity. They will lead each element of the organisation to appreciate their role in the customer’s end experience. And as they do, brands will rise and fall based on their transparent, openly available customer service experiences.

Openness as marketing

Secondly, beyond customer service alone, marketers will find ways to create value and advantage from openness in how their organisation communicates and interacts with the outside world.

Some simple examples:

Skittles & econsultancy

Skittles, the American candy brand, and econsultancy, the global marketing membership organisation, don’t share a great deal of characteristics. One is B2C, a ‘food’ while the other is B2B and a publishing and community business. But both have experimented with the power of open in their marketing by transparently displaying tweets about their brand names on their own homepages.

During their now-famous campaign, Skittles turned its whole website homepage over to tweets from people – anyone – mentioning the word ‘skittles’ in their 140 character update. The result was a minimally-filtered stream of consciousness from a global audience of Skittles lovers, haters and people playing a old-fashioned game of bowling! The rationale here is: ‘we are what people say we are – and we’re bold enough to project what they say about us on our own sparkly website’. econsultancy continues to do this to this very day: across their popular marketing resource (but no longer on their homepage) website is a stream of recent tweets mentioning the brand.

Crowdsourcing as marketing

Kickstarter is an incredible exemplar of what is possible with openness in marketing. Kickstarter is a platform where I – a creative – can outline a project I’d like to bring to life: a film I’d like to shoot, a book I’d like to write, a technology I’d like to develop. After describing my would-be project, I can invite the world to become ‘backers’ – that is, to co-fund the development of the project in return for a small reward – a signed copy of the book for $25 or a private reading for $250!

Some projects are hugely over-subscribed – those that ‘go viral’ and are passed through social networks as must-help projects, whilst others just meet their targets and some don’t at all. The crowd decides, and the crowd funds: this is crowdfunding.

Given that an established marketing practice is research, focus groups, test marketing and piloting and so on, why won’t this kind of early-stage openness and participation become mainstream marketing in the development of products and services? And what a powerful prize: to turn consumers into investors, into co-creators.

7. Finance

In the progressive business of the 21st century, openness plays an incredibly important role in the finances of an organisation. So important, in fact, that there is a whole chapter dedicated to that topic here: Finances

8. Privacy

One note of caution: privacy must not be confused with Openness or – worse – actually lost in this drive towards a more open world. It is true that notions of privacy are changing, particularly in younger people growing up having never known anything but a world with an Internet. But for some that is an excuse to ride roughshod over people’s reasonable expectations and rights to robust personal privacy.

So as managers, employers and marketers, we must treat privacy with the highest regard. In general, people must have control over their own data and must not feel exposed without their consent and forewarning.

‘Open and appropriately private’ is the goal.

9. Competition

Given all of this openness, where does competition fit? What even is competition in the context of a more open, more connected 21st century? Who are we competing with? And why?

As my business partner and long-term collaborator Pete Burden commented as I published this extract on my blog ‘Competition (as we have previously understood it) only makes sense in a world of scarcity and underlying a lot of what you are saying about openness is the opposite of scarcity – an abundance of easily replicated information and data’. He is right. And it is unresolved both in this book and in my mind.

It is true that notions of competition are changing. You must have noticed, as I have, the rise of the use of terms like ‘frenemy’ and ‘co-opetition’. What is interesting is how digital culture is beginning to change organisational culture. On the internet, linking to other good content is what makes the web tick. Which led old-school business people to question ‘why would we link to him, he works for the competition?’. And on the internet, communities grow organically, messily, collaboratively and together create valuable ecosystems – and then the question from old-school (and logical) business is ‘so who owns this?’ which creates all kinds of brain-wrangling challenges for intellectual property law and for community members. Take Facebook for example – is the value in the platform, or in the user base (ie the community)? And if it is indeed the community, what is their reward, their share scheme and payback?

Finally on competition, it may seem that we are entering a world of abundance but one crucial constraint may be our attention. In the end, whilst we collaborate much more and work closely in co-opetition with traditional competitors, the available attention for what we provide may be scarce. Competition is not going away (for many, it is massively intensifying) – it is adapting and evolving in this more open world.

Summary

Openness is a fascinating topic and trend. Like a force of nature, it is awesomely powerful and not always benign or kind to those on the receiving end. And like a force of nature, that huge power that it possesses can be partially harnessed. In business, our tendency is try to resist openness. Business usually wants closed-ness. It wants control, narrowness, monopoly, few rather than many, integration, quality, secrecy. Very often, business wants to be opaque. Generally, business people find openness terrifying.

But regardless, its power grows. Society is becoming more and more connected, which is leading to more and more openness. We can batten down the hatches, hate what it brings, and hope that it passes, and ideally soon. Or we can harness its energy, go with it, run full force with it and throw everything we have into being more open. In this chapter we have looked ways to do so. To make it happen, as everything else in this book, will require grit and vision, and will lead to extremely positive cultural change.

As progressive business people, this is a wonderful opportunity and a force we can channel to help us make things better.

Further reading

Wikinomics – Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
Open Leadership – Charlene Li

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: starting the Change Velocity chapter…

Thank you for your support,

Will

Hello people,

There was an intermission while I made some serious progress on writing the book over Christmas, and then I had a trip to the USA.

But now I will be regularly publishing 3 or so extracts a week and would love your continued feedback and sharing.

General progress is quite exciting as the cover design has now been commissioned, and when I get some early designs I’ll be sharing them here.

Today, we’re breaking Openness down into 8 chunks – here’s the first 4.

Let me know what you think,

Will

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To understand how contemporary organisations are more open, we need to look at eight distinct areas of openness.

The eight areas of Openness

1.    Culture & behaviour
2.    Environment
3.    Systems
4.    Innovation
5.    Environment
6.    Marketing and communications
7.    Finance
8.    Privacy

1. Culture & behaviour

To discuss openness meaningfully, we need to start with your (or any) organisation’s culture and behaviour. There’s a reason why this book is called Culture Shock, and that is because so many of the adaptations that need to happen and the opportunities that are available are cultural. The following six domains on this list all interact with culture – they create it and they are created by it, the are all interlinked. But culture is like the glue binding them all together, which is why it is first.

So what does an open culture look like? Here’s a checklist; as you read through it, think about your own organisation and where you are.

In an open culture:

•    Almost all information is available to almost all members of the organisation – there are few secrets and it is easy to get the information you need.
•    People across the whole organisation are open about their emotions – there is little disguising or hiding of true feelings
•    Collaboration is a natural state, both within distinct organisational structures (like teams and divisions) and across them – there is little evidence of silos and no problem with people hoarding knowledge and protecting turf
•    The organisation collaborates as well as competes with its competitors – there is a nuanced view that competitors are also valuable collaborators who help build the market and ongoing joint projects

2. Environment

Interestingly the trend towards openness is also affecting our organisations internal environments, and has been – along with other trends over the past decades like those of global competition and the associated pressures for some companies to drive down costs in order to compete  – is beginning to transform how our workspaces look and operate.

Some of the emerging elements of these changing working environments include:

A shift from closed offices and cubicles to more shared spaces. Increasingly organisations are re-designing their spaces to have more ‘third spaces’ as Starbucks described themselves – that is, casual, comfortable, collaborative spaces like coffee shops, sofa areas and open plan spaces suited to informal meetings and conversations.

A shift from fixed desk spaces for all towards more hot-desking and even co-working. For several decades this has been happening, and many people have experienced both the pluses and the minuses of hot-desking. The next iteration of this trend is co-working: collaborative, shared workspaces for freelancers, independents and distributed employees who would otherwise work from home or alone in solo office spaces. What is particularly interesting about co-working spaces is how they physically design-in the opportunities for cross-over, serendipity and formal collaboration that we look at in the area of Innovation just a little bit further on in this list. In a co-working space, an architect sits next to a web developer, who sits across from a medical instruments sales rep, who shares a desk space with their illustrator partner. Co-working is the physical manifestation of a blended, connected, loosely connected workforce.

A shift from ‘the company provides the best technology’ to an emerging ‘Bring Your Own’ approach. Not long ago, the technology at work was pretty good and often better than that which most of us had access to at home. Over the past decade, that balance has inverted – many employees in developed and developing countries have better technology in their pockets and their home-offices than they are made to use at work! We are just starting to see intelligent organisations moving to harness this trend, with an emerging movement towards ‘here’s your tech budget, here’s an approved list of technology that will play nice with company systems – go choose the tools that are best for you and your job’.

A shift from company firewalls preventing access to large chunks of the web to an opening up of permission and a corresponding move towards IT as enablers rather than policers. When I worked in a traditional business in my first and (so far) only ‘proper’ job, it quickly became obvious that IT were gatekeepers. Theoretically there to serve the organisation, the IT manager wielded an unusual amount of power and seemed to revel in making things difficult. As an aside, he meant well, and did actually wear Disney ties – some stereotypes are true! Fortunately, times have changed in some organisations and there are those in IT who see themselves not only as gatekeepers and managers of security, but also as enablers of business results. As a result, in some organisations there is an enlightened recognition that employees need access to almost all of the web in order to carry out their lives and often to do their jobs too. The ‘Bring Your Own’ tech approach above is also a pretty enlightened trend. Long may the shift from IT as police to enablers continue! We look at this in more detail in Chapter Six on Technology.

3. Systems

Do you remember when Google Maps first came into your world? Suddenly, Google Maps was everywhere. It was the backdrop for news items on TV as the presenter introduced a piece about Iraq or Iowa – there was this big fat sattelite-y map and in the corner the Google Maps logo. It was soon popping up on other organisations’ websites – there, in the middle of an otherwise branded web page, was a Google Map of their office location. And then entirely new services popped up plotting all sorts of interesting property or crime or weather data onto a map that just happened to be a Google Map.

What Google had done so brilliantly was to build openness into the heart of their Google Map product. This was a map that came with a plug and a set of rules that said ‘hey, as long as you follow these rules, you can come along and plug into me and have a Google Map as part of your service and for free’.

You see, somewhat fascinatingly for non-technical geeks like me who are attracted to shiny cool technologies that do really useful things, openness, if allowed to, reaches into the very guts of a progressive organisation. It goes beyond the culture and the office layout into the very fundamentals of a business, into its systems and its inner core.

This is a huge and unstoppable trend, so let’s look at some of the core opportunities

APIs. Although Application Programming Interface isn’t the most user-friendly name it does do what it says on the tin from a technology perspective. I think of an API as a plug available in Company A (like with the Google Maps example or Facebook) that allows Companies B, C, and D to come along and plug into Company A and access some of the core functionality it provides. Simply put, this allows Companies B, C and D to get a lot more done with massively less resources – ‘hey, we don’t need to create a whole map thing now – we just plug into Google Maps for that part of our new property search engine’. And it allows Company A to substantially increase the distribution of their offering and their brand, and to build competitive advantage through having an ecosystem of related services that build on top of their own, but at little additional cost to themselves (Company A, that is).

This is how – in simple terms – independent companies are producing apps and games used daily by million inside Facebook. Facebook provides the platform, the plug, the rules, and independent companies are then able to develop their apps and games that take advantage of Facebook’s gigantic user base, its user information, its login functionality – the whole damn thing! In theory, everyone wins. Zynga, producers of Farmville, Mafia Wars and Words With Friends, did $600m revenues in 2010, a huge percent from game playing happening inside Facebook.

APIs tend to favour companies that have distinct, systematised products and services, and those which are powered by databases and technology – at least at first glance. So organisations providing very tailored products and services may struggle to identify opportunity here. But Facebook and Google Maps may be poor examples to use, because they allow the rest of us in non-digital native companies to get off the hook. That may be a little too easy. This is a seismic shift in how – from a systems point of view – business gets done in the networked 21st century. It will come knocking at your organisation and market sooner or later.

To find an opportunity, the way to think about the value that an API strategy can create is to think ‘What is the very core of our organisation? What are the crown jewels, and how could we accomplish our goals better by allowing other organisations (or individuals) to plug into a carefully considered part of those jewels in a way that creates value for us and for them?’

Open data

Let’s look at an overlapping opportunity but from a consumer’s point of view.

What would it be like if your bank could give you not only your balance and your recent transaction information, but could also provide a dashboard that gave you a sense of the trends in your personal finances and some meaningful insights into patterns and quirks that allowed you to better understand and manage your money?

What would it be like if you car could help you understand what your driving is like, and particularly when your driving style is more economical (financially and environmentally) and less, and when that tends to be in your journeys and why, and what you can do about it?

And, avoiding the old cliché of the Internet Fridge, would it be helpful if you could Google for your keys when you misplaced them at home (seriously, how cool will that be?), and if you could look up your cat flap data to tell whether the cat was in or out? Increasingly, objects are becoming connected to the Internet. The next generation of the web – the Semantic Web – is often popularly characterised as The Internet of Things. Soon it won’t just be people and data connected to one another through the web: almost everything will be connected.

In this digitized world, we are all leaving trails of breadcrumbs behind us that are being collected by the companies and organisations providing services to us. Recognising this, there is a whole raft of innovation happening around this idea of unlocking existing data stores to give value back to the creators – that is, the consumers and users – of that data. Some people are calling these ‘data handbacks’, and you can see this trend also located in the rise of visualizations of data, in infographics being used in the media to convey complex information through images as well as many other newly spawned opportunities.

Many banks and financial services institutions are beginning to hand back useful intelligence to their customers through a raft of ‘Personal Finance Managers’ – a good example for further research is Mint.com. The car example I gave just a moment ago is actually the Fiat 500 Eco-Drive which does exactly that – provides useful web-based information, nicely visualized, to the owners of their cars to help them understand and improve their driving.

Here’s a business-to-business example: Zappos, who we looked at earlier, has a vendor extranet where the c. 1,000 suppliers that it buys its many lines of shoes from can login and monitor the various stock levels for the lines that they supply. Nothing too revolutionary there, though I’d bet many companies wouldn’t allow their suppliers to do the same based on attitudes rather than technology limitations. But what about this? Zappos then permits those thousand or so vendors to raise Purchase Orders from Zappos to them to order new stock where they feel is necessary. Let me play that back to you: the supplier raises order from its customer to buy more stuff from itself, when it wants to. Zappos sees this as ‘a thousand extra people helping us to manage our business’. Pow!

So the question for you is ‘What information do you hold that could be enormously valuable to your customers, employees and stakeholders?’. And think about it good: there’s gold in them thar hills.

Open vs Closed systems

An interesting related consequence of the rise of Open is the tension between Open and Closed Systems. It is not something we are able to look at in detail here, but keep your eye on the positive conflict between open systems and closed systems. An example would be the open Google Android operating system for mobile devices in contrast with the closed ‘vertically integrated’ Apple system of iOS and iTunes, or the open Linux operating system for computers in contrast with the closed Windows operating system.

Both approaches have advantages: as an Apple user, I enjoy the (relatively) seamless integration between my iPhone, my iPad, the Macbook Pro that I have written this book on and my iTunes account. It generally ‘just works’, the quality is high, things work the same across different touchpoints. Yet here I am espousing the benefits of open systems.

4. Innovation

Perhaps the most radical influence of Openness has been in how businesses innovate in the late 20th and now early 21st century.

Crowdsourcing innovation

In 2010 a Russian by the name of Yury Bodrov solved twelve well-paid tricky ‘challenges’ for businesses around the world that he may never need to physically meet. That problem-solving feat made Yury the top solver of the year on innovation marketplace Innocentive. Yury is prolific – the next solver on the year’s leaderboard solved four challenges. And the challenges were not posted by just any old businesses: challenges have been set on Innocentive by P&G, NASA, Lilly and Roche.

You can think of Innocentive as a dating website where companies with business problems that they need solving can advertise their unfulfilled wishes to talented specialists that love solving problems. Solvers might be passionate soloist ‘amateurs’ working from their garden shed or a local lab, or highly paid professional scientists moonlighting. As Alph Bingham of Innocentive said at a recent event: “95% time the solver wouldn’t have been hired by sponsor”. This is problem-solving from the edges, or some kind of formalised serendipity – a way of gathering intelligence from the unexplored, unaccessed corners of possibility. And it is a valuable exchange for those involved.

At Threadless, community members submit new t-shirt designs, community members vote for their favourite designs which then go into production and community members send in photos of themselves and their friends wearing the t-shirts, which Threadless then adds to the product pages. So which bits of the typical t-shirt business does Threadless actually do? Well it prints the t-shirts, it takes some nice photos of them when they are first ready to be purchased, it takes the money and it sends them out – the logistics. But it’s just a hobby business though, right? Although the company doesn’t disclose financials often, it is in the public domain that Threadless is turned over $30m in 2009.

These kind of collaborative, online problem-solving endeavours have been called Crowdsourcing – the idea of harvesting or sourcing effort and intelligence from an online crowd or community.

This great opening up has been a radical shift in how innovation gets done in some organisations.

Previously, innovation was a matter for the Research & Development department. In-house talent would cook up the new product developments, and great innovation factories like 3M (sticky notes!) and Proctor & Gamble (the Swiffer!) would churn them out. This was both a practical reality and a source of company pride.

In this networked age, however, the opportunities to solve problems are far greater. As we have already touched on, businesses are no longer limited by their own available equipment, time, talent and resources. By opening up their fortress walls, these organisations are able to draw on talent dotted around the globe, on ideas and problem solving approaches that have not (and perhaps would not) emerged inside their own four walls and so can get better quality solutions to problems, and quicker too.

It’s like businesses have begun to get over the idea of themselves as the be-all-and-end-all and found a new found humility. That, or the economics of crowdsourcing as deeply compelling to profit-driven businesses in a hyper-competitive marketplace!

Getting stuff done in Government

As governments and local authorities wrangle with their delivery challenges in the recent austere, harsh economic environment, they too are exploring how opening up both their resources (like data stores) and their workloads to distributed groups can help. This is not crowdsourced innovation in the mode of Innocentive, but more like crowdsourcing-as-innovation.

Launched in 2009 by Hilary Clinton, the ‘Virtual Student Foreign Service’ is a U.S. Department of State programme harnessing ‘technology and a commitment to global service among young people to facilitate new forms of diplomatic engagement’.

The VSFS pairs ‘e-interns’ it has recruited – all of whom are American students –  with State department offices and US diplomatic posts worldwide, whom they then help with a variety of tasks from their own college and university campuses around the world.

As the VSFS says on its website: “Past projects asked students to:
•    Develop and implement a public relations campaign using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. to communicate and reach out to youth
•    Conduct research on the economic situation, prepare graphic representations of economic data, and prepare informational material for the U.S. Embassy website
•    Create a system to gather and analyze media coverage on a set of topics including environment, health, and trade
•    Research IT-based interventions that have been successful in higher education, particularly in teacher training
•    Write and contribute biweekly articles to the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page on topics such as internet, computer science/technology, history, and literature
•    Develop a series of professional instructional video clips to be published by the U.S. Embassy
•    Survey social media efforts of U.S. diplomatic posts, NGOs, and private companies around the world to help establish best practices in a U.S. Embassy’s social media outreach business plan.”

A global workforce of unpaid, willing volunteers? Seems to work for the U.S. State Department in these lean times.

Smaller steps in crowdsourcing

However, the big, developed end of crowdsourcing that we have looked at above is increasingly well understood. There are whole books and events and – as we’ve seen – innovation marketplaces enabling this wonderful connectivity between those with something they need and those with something to give.

What else is there to enable Innovation in progressive businesses around crowdsourcing? There are a couple of fairly simple trends worthy of our attention, both building on these ideas of the organisation having porous edges so that ideas can flow in and out.

Firstly, hackdays. Hackdays are a wonderfully simple and useful phenomenon to emerge from the developer community. Like any community, software developers have always been drawn to one another and have a rich history of meetups and big community events where they can get together, geek out and make stuff. At hackdays, developers, designers and creatives get together – usually at a weekend – to ‘hack’ something together: that is, to make something, and usually something they personally believe in – something that scratches an itch they have. Barcamps – a global network of open, user-generated conferences – really helped distribute the methods and benefits of hackdays to a global audience.

We are now seeing the rise of nichely focused hackdays, either around a cause, a specific niche area or around a technology. Organisations are also increasingly using hackdays to either foster internal innovation or even externally, like the recent Honda Hackday in London.

Social Innovation Camp is a brilliant example. Founded by a few good-spirited, frustrated people in London who that felt there was a huge opportunity to innovate more to provide better practical solutions to social issues in society that just were not being taken up by the usual solution provides of Government, charities and NGOS. The Social Innovation Camp guys felt passionately that some of the making and getting-stuff-done-ness of the hackday formula could be brought usefully to bear on the job of innovating around social causes. The first Social Innovation Camp was run in London in April 2008.

In the UK alone Social Innovation Camps have generated more than 450 ideas of which over 30 have been protoyped into social ventures, and a few have continued to grow including MyPolice, ‘an online feedback system for the police service, allowing direct, open conversations between the public and the police’, and the awesomely practical SimpleCRB which provides ‘A cheaper, quicker and more effective CRB checking service for organisations in the voluntary and public sector’. Real outcomes. And Social Innovation Camp has now spread far beyond London alone: camps have happened in Nigeria, South Korea, Australia, Slovakia, Georgia, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia. These lightweight, open movements are so much more viral than their centralised predeccesors – they spread.

Secondly and perhaps most simply of all, one of the most practical trends around this growing porosity in the edges of organisations is the rise of formats that bring guest speakers and potential collaborators into the organisation. Driven by the rise of the great talks available from inspiring events like the TED and TEDx series and the wonderful DO Lectures in Wales, there seems to be a growing consciousness that the world is full of interesting and alarmingly talented people that if we’re not careful, we may never hear from.

At NixonMcInnes we operate a First Friday programme where we simply ask interesting people we know to come and talk to us about their work on the first friday of every month. I think we ‘borrowed’ the idea from Google which has a whole external speaker programme in place bringing some of the world’s most interesting speakers to talk to their employees. Why wouldn’t we all do that?

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How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: Finishing off the 8 areas of Openness by looking at areas 5 – 8.

Thank you for your support.

Will

Hello shock-heads,

Hopefully you are not yet suffering from gout due to your Christmassy over-indulgence, and are instead primed and ready for some snippety business reading, eh.

So, having finished Leadership, we’re now onto a core element of how a progressive, social business *is*, which is open.

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CHAPTER FIVE: OPENNESS

The world we now live in radically more open than that which is existed even five years ago. With the digitization of information, our society is only beginning to scratch the surface of what it is to live in a world where openness is easy and increasingly the default. Do you remember the first time you were sent an email you shouldn’t have seen? Who can forget poor Claire Swires and her email to her boyfriend (or was it fiancé?)! With the prevalence of Facebook, incidents like these happen every minute of every day across continents and hundreds of millions of active users. We are still coming to terms with the incredibly low-friction and massively high reach of sharing in the age of the Internet, even today.

Wikileaks releases top secret government records, journalists are able to hobble media empires and members of parliament through careful and persistent chasing down of digital information. Hacktivists Anonymous expose the names of visitors to paedophilia websites and hack Iranian government email systems. Videos of rogue employees misbehaving at work go around the globe in minutes, amongst billions of hours of video footage of kittens, double-rainbows and other oddities and extreme events that transcend themselves to become popular ‘memes’, ending up on t-shirts and in popular parlance.

And our young people are growing up in an age where they may have thousands of friends in social networks, a digital footprint of photos since they were babies that have been published in some form on the internet without their permission and are so creating new norms and new behaviours which have older generations shocked at the lack of privacy.

On the plus side, we can look up user-generated reviews of the restaurants we plan to eat in, the hotels we plan to stay in, of the tradespeople we plan on hiring to work in our homes. We can learn from other parents in Mumsnet, from other car-lovers in Pistonheads, from other gardeners and geneaologists and learners and whoever else we seek, in the ecosystem of niche communities that create a flow of open, helpful information that could never have existed before.

Hard-edged corporations too, even those with the glossiest of brands such as Proctor & Gamble and TK, have begun to share their most troubling and tricky business problems through crowdsourcing platforms and innovation marketplaces like Innocentive to collaborate and co-create solutions with networks of independent problem-solvers and customers alike.

Why is the progressive business more Open?

First and foremost, it makes sense for a progressive business to be more open because openness itself is irresistable. We cannot stop this trend, we cannot hold back this tide, so surely and inevitably we must instead celebrate and harness it.

That may be a little too based on faith alone. Businesses that are inherently more open cannot be driven simply because of some far-off understanding that one day the world will be more like this, can they? There must be some shorter-term reward, something more imminent, more pressing, more rewarding sooner. There must be jam today for openness to be a powerful part of this radical business movement.

In fact, by being more open a social business opens up tremendous new opportunities for itself, its people, its customers and wider stakeholders. These benefits include:

•    More powerful commitment and smarter problem solving internally thanks to greater openness around information and performance internally
•    Lower cost and higher impact marketing through the sharing of valuable information from the inside of the organisation to the wider world
•    Drastically lowering the cost of R&D through innovative and blended approaches to creation
•    Serendipity and unexpected consequences from outsiders making connections and creating possibilities where the organisation could not see or make them (not only in ‘innovation’ but in progress and activity generally)
•    To reduce costs and massively increase consumer loyalty and word of mouth buzz by capitalising on the trend towards greater participation between creator and consumer, including crowdsourcing, co-creation, crowd-funding and so on
•    And as a result of all of these, substantially reduced risks through being better prepared and more able to cope in an open world, which in turn creates a competitive advantage over slower, more reluctant competitors

—

Just a quick one today to set the scene. The next extract will outline 7 practical areas where the power of Open can be applied 🙂

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: 7 areas that open can be harnessed.

Thank you for your support.

Merry thingybob, Will

Yo Christmas fiends!

Here’s the third and final section that makes up this chapter on Leadership.

Please do share your feedback – instructions below.

Will.

————–

How do I go on this journey?

We can boil all of these elements down into seven practices which can help any leader learn and adapt.

1.    The Open 360 degree survey
2.    Experimentation
3.    Sharing personal failures
4.    Practicing being emotionally congruent
5.    Publishing a personal rewards log
6.    Using flow tools to share and listen to your team/organisation
7.    Building a progressive support network

Let’s rattle through the practicalities of each practice:

1. The Open 360 degree survey

This one is awesomely simple and awesomely effective. Take your role description, and put it into an online survey platform like Survey Monkey (or your internal equivalent). Set it up your survey to have a Quantitative element and a Qualititive element.

In the quantitative section, configure the survey so that questionees can grade your performance on each area of your role by giving a score (I use 1-5). Results in this section will give you a clear personal benchmark on how the respondents evaluate your performance.

In the qualitative section, ask wide open questions designed to give your valuable insights into your performance, your strengths and vitally, your weaknesses.

I use questions like:

1. What do I do that enables positive performance in the team?
2. What do I do that impairs or reduces performance in the company?
3. What should get more of my time and attention?
4. What 3 things – if sorted – will substantially improve the company’s performance?
5. How can I serve the company better in the next 6 months?
6. This is just in case there’s something extra you want to say or share. You don’t need to, it’s just for those compelled to say more. I know I’m confusing you now. Sorry.

Before sending this out, you need to talk (ideally face to face) with the people who will be responding. Tell them why you are doing it (clue: to learn!), tell them that you have set it up anonymously because it is about you learning, not about you addressing individual concerns or carrying out a veiled witch hunt, but if anyone feels compelled to they can say in the survey who they are. And promise that you will share the high-level results and key takeaways with them – give them a prize and satisfy their curiousity too!

Then send it out, and let the learning begin! You will learn so much about yourself. You may recognise many things, but you may also be shocked or unsettled by others. The important thing, as my colleague Lasy always says, is ‘to not swallow the feedback whole’. No one person is ‘right’ – these are all just many-faceted collages or perceptions of you at work. But overall, the aggregate will tell you some valuable things.

I recommend doing this once or twice a year. I’m doing mine right now after an 18 month gap due to a shift in annual review cycles at our company, and I am alive with and challenged by the brilliant, gritty, intelligent, on-the-button responses coming back. It’s like I’m awake again. Do it. Start today.

2. Experimentation

Particularly in the area of Styles – which we looked at above – you will need to experiment. You may find through your 360 survey that there are styles you have which create great performance in those around you, and others that you have which bring the team down – this is normal.

The goal of experimentation is to expand your range. Try some of the below for size and see how they feel to you and how your people react:

•    Relentlessly detail oriented
•    Laid back, bigger picture, dreamy and visionary
•    Energetic and bouncy ball of sunshine
•    Quiet and pensive professor
•    Shouty desk-slamming hardballer
•    All-conquering warrior-heroine
•    Cheerleading supporter-in-chief and championer of others – ‘you can do it!’

Again, where possible it may help to be open about this – to let your people know that you are learning and developing and part of that is about experimenting with styles that are different to your usual two or three default modes.

By the way, what are your default modes? And which styles would you like to add to the range?

3. Sharing personal failures

Simultaneously the easiest and the hardest practice to do. It really is this simple: tell your organisation about it when you screw up. You can start small if that helps – might help the people around you to adjust too! Using the Church of Fail practice outlined in the People chapter will also provide a powerful and shared platform to do this in.

You can also use some of the platforms that we look at in the Technology chapter to regularly ping out failures (and successes!) without too much pomp and ceremony. In doing so, you normalise failure. This is not seppuku (or it shouldn’t be) – it is about demonstrating that failure is normal, that it is a huge learning opportunity, and that if the organisation and individuals in it are not failing, then they cannot be doing their jobs because they are not learning and not taking risks. Keep that in mind: you’re doing the right thing and it will help the organisation.

4. Practicing being emotionally congruent

Another challenging practice that is easy to say and very difficult to do sometimes. The benefits of being more congruent more of the time are that you will create a more empathic culture, which will lead to less stress for all (including you) because people will not be bottling up their emotions, a more robust and resilient workforce thanks to healthier inter-relationships, and greater performance and productivity due to the flow of more-honest feedback around the team(s).

There’s lots more to this topic that we do not have time for and that is way out of my expertise, but an appropriately straightforward entry point to doing this that we have found very useful in our company is to preface statements with “I feel….”. It’s like a hack for the mind, and gets you straight into accessing some of the feelings related to the topic of discussions rather than the emotion coming out accidentally through the other 99% of your communication (i.e. your body language).

So you say:

“I feel disappointed”
“I feel amazed”
“I feel delighted”
“I feel incredibly annoyed”

5. Publishing a personal rewards log

The British journalist and activist George Monbiot recently began publishing his own Registry of Interests completely voluntarily. As he says himself, ‘I have opened this registry because I believe that journalists should live by the standards they demand of others, among which are accountability and transparency. One of the most important questions in public life, which is asked less often than it should be, is “who pays?”’.

Is there a way you can do the same? It may be impossible. It may in fact, for you, be a sackable offence! So it’s probably worth checking your contract, but if you are an entrepreneur or the CEO, you can make this happen.

6. Using ‘flow tools’ to share and listen to your team/organisation

In the Technology chapter we look at platforms including those we call ‘flow tools’. These are the same kind of tools that CEOs Cristobal Conde and John Chambers referred to earlier in this chapter – things like Yammer and blogging – which are less formal and much quicker than other traditional communication channels available to a leader or manager.

This is not technology for technology’s sake. You don’t have time for that. Using these tools is a powerful way to demonstrate to your team or organisation the need to and value in moving in realtime. The benefit is that by participating you not only make it OK for others and show the way, but also yourself gain access to a realtime pulse of what is happening inside the organisation.

7. Building a progressive support network

Finally, you cannot do this alone. You need a support network, and one made up of people that get all of this. As a leader, no matter at what level in an organisation, there are times when you inevitably feel isolated or need the support of those outside your team. If the only kind of support you have is the slash and burn or command-and-control management 20th century style, then it will be hard to see these challenging personal changes through.

Find people to support you. Put yourself in places where they may come out of the woodwork. Share these ideas so that others might come on the journey and so become part of your network too. Get involved with organisations like WorldBlu, The Employee Ownership Association (UK), National Center for Employee Ownership (USA), and others.

It will be much easier with the right kind of support.

Summary

In this chapter we have looked at the role of leadership in the 21st century business, and broken that role into two lists of seven: seven components of leadership in a social business and seven practices to help develop your 21st century leadership muscles.

This journey towards better leadership is absolutely a journey. It requires change – and change is incredibly demanding. It demands you to get out of your comfort zones, to experiment and necessarily fail, to do things that the people around you find counter-intuitive or even downright odd. And during this journey and especially at times of stress it will be normal to default to old ways.

But the prize is magical, poetic, so brilliant. To become a better leader. To be the change you want to see in the world. To help others see different and better ways of behaving in business.

If you can lead in this world, you will be providing a powerful service to more than just your organisation – you will genuinely be helping make the world we live in better. Because it is only through significant change, led by leaders at all levels, that we will solve the problems that need solving in the world.

Join us. Come on the journey, and bring your people, your organisation. Let’s burn yesterday and make a better future for all!

—-

Whaddayareckon? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: We move on from Leadership and start the chapter on Openness…

Thank you for your support.

With mince pies and mulled wine at the ready, Will

Hello leaders of the revolution,

Sorry this section is so big – but I wanted you to get it all in one hit.

Lemme know what you think, all of the feedback and edits continue to be HUGELY helpful,

Will

——

So what does progressive Leadership look like?

Here are 7 components of Leadership in a social business.

1.    Self
2.    Style
3.    Trust & Ethics
4.    Transparency
5.    Rewards
6.    Communication / Realtime
7.    Support

1. Leading yourself

Just as this book puts People before Leadership, we must also put leading yourself before leading others.

There is a reason why we have the appallingly bleak but recognisable models of management style such as the mushroom management (‘keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em crap’), the seagull (‘arrive in a flap, squawk around for a while, crap over everybody and then fly out’) and so on. It’s because we have all seen and experienced them! They do exist.

Will those approaches to leadership help organisations thrive in the 21st century? I really don’t believe so. So what allows this to happen in the first place? Two things: a lack of organisational awareness and a lack of personal awareness.

As transparency rises in society at large and inside businesses in particular, more and more feedback will exist openly about manager and leader performance. As the agenda to make boardrooms more transparent and accountable to shareholders and wider stakeholders, again the same forces will drive an openness and awareness previously unseen. The organisation will learn more quickly and more transparently what works and who performs, which naturally then must influence the individual leaders and managers. Transparency has a momentum of its own – and will permeate all of our organisations.

As a result, in the evolved organisation it will be very hard to lead others unless you are constantly learning and improving in how you manager yourself. (In fact, that is the case today – it’s just a lot of people get away with crap leadership because the world allows them to).

So knowing how to lead yourself means knowing the answers to the following questions:

•    What is my purpose in this work?
•    What motivates and demotivates me?
•    What are my values, and which ones am I honouring and which am I not honouring in this work?
•    What do I believe my strengths and weaknesses are, and how am I consciously working with them?
•    What do the people around me believe my strengths and weaknesses are?
•    How do I bounce back from challenges and re-energise when I’m low?
•    What are my blind spots, what don’t I know about myself?
•    What do I tend to resist or ignore?

Knowing these answers is an iterative and constant learning process. The answers may change over time, or become more (or less) clear. Knowing to keep reflecting on them, and practicing and evolving methods of operating from these answers is the key to self-leadership.

2. Style

Just as we are all different, so are our styles and approaches to engaging with people and therefore ‘leading’. There is no correct style for this kind of evolved business we look at throughout this book.

However, there are a few stylistic themes or tensions to be aware of. The first is the tension between being the all-solving hero and the convenor or curator of the group.

Heroic leadership

In the popular definition of leadership, the leader rides in on his white stallion, glistening in the midday sun, holding a spear aloft, squinting slightly with a look of hard resolve, his mouth (and this leader definitely is a ‘him’) is very human, his ears wise, his arms strong, his hands etc etc. You get the idea. Now that he has arrived, the problem will be solved. Be it through wisdom, strength, bravery or decisiveness, this leader will fix it and in record time! ‘Stand back, minions!!! I AM SOLVING THE PROBLEM!’.

Personally, I find this style very attractive, and am drawn to it regularly. One of my biggest flaws is that I want to be the hero, the all-fixing leader. If you have the same idea about how you should be as a leader, then you will find that the issue is that it crowds out the possibility for others to participate, for the group to function as a whole, and for others to step up and take responsibility. To unlock a team’s full potential through their participation and democratic practices, this style may not be best. To engage an organisation of smart, progressive people that have seen through the fallacies of old school leadership, this style may not be best.

Convening, curating, gardening

Perhaps a better style to adopt more of the time is that not of the hero, but of a convener or curator of the group – be that a whole organisation or a small team. The shift here is from being the individual fixer that the most complex issues get escalated to, to being the person that helps the group observe what is happening, creates the space for them to share in that information, helps them reach decisions and create accountability.

This is a more removed personal style of leadership than the heroic mode – this is leadership as facilitation, or if you prefer the metaphor, gardening. Adding something here, pruning a little there, encouraging this bit to come forward, digging deeper, patiently nurturing changes and growth.

Given that we are now managing groups of people whose behaviour and attitudes may be becoming more like volunteers, that we are managing people distributed physically (whether they are working from home or working across multiple geographies), and in an environment where the best talent have given up on the idea of a job for life and can pick or choose from the best jobs, our style may need to increasingly be one of influencing over directing. Or curating/gardening over heroic leadership.

The challenge for you and any of us is that when we are told ‘you’re in charge’ then assuming a directive style is easy. Or at least it is a known style – it’s what we’ve been trained in since school. I say jump, you say how high! Teacher, boss, captain, coach, General – all of these have had different styles, but the commonly held view is that leadership is about telling people what to do and making sure they do it. As emotionally intelligent types, we probably don’t couch it like that – but our inclinations, particularly under stress, will be directive. It is the established paradigm, so no need to explain that. What can be much harder is to resist that model and the indoctrination there, and to overcome your urges to just tell everyone what to do. The challenge, then, is to influence and persuade, to garden and curate, rather than just directing.

Managing volunteers and creating ‘followership’

As we have touched on, the people in our organisations will increasingly demand this adapted, evolved style of management. Gen Y in particular seek the dialogue, participation and feedback from their manager, and meaning in the work. Managing Gen Y is often characterised as managing volunteers: finding ways to excite, cajole and generate tangible results from a group of people who have lots to give but will not respond well to just being told what to do.

As John Chambers, the long-standing CEO of Cisco put it in an interview with TK: “I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a different leadership style — more collaboration and teamwork, including using Web 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I’d be video blogging and blogging, I would have said, no way. And yet our 20-somethings in the company really pushed me to use that more.”

Interestingly, at Gore they talk about Leadership being ‘defined by followership’. That is, that the group nominates its leaders – they “vote with their feet” as CEO Terri Kelly puts it. You cannot be a leader at Gore without having people that are willing to follow you. What a powerful evolution from the norm.

So the question for you is how do you create followership in your work? What is it that you do that makes the people around you want to follow you? And what is that you do that makes people not want to follow you? Finally, if your people weren’t paid and were volunteers, how would you engage with them to create the best results possible?

Changing styles

But leadership is situational. There surely will be occasions where this more directive ‘heroic’ stance is the right one to take. And others where being the curator or gardener will generate the best results for and from the group. That is the judgement we all have to make continuously – which style and approach is right for this context.

3. Trust & Ethics

Underpinning much of the 21st century approach to leadership are Trust and Ethics.

The trust dimension is trusting in the people and the practices of the organisation to deliver the desired results. Trust is particularly important in order to accept some of the contemporary practices we talk about in this book: giving power to more of the people in the organisation; allowing new spokespeople to emerge; entrusting big decisions to groups rather than making decisions in ones and twos.

Without trust, there can be no empowerment of others – instead, a lack of trust creates a centre of gravity that leads to micromanagement across the whole organisation, which in turn creates slowness, bottlenecks, stifles creativity and so on.

So there must be trust flowing from the leaders in the organisation. There should be a default ‘I trust you’ position rather than a default ‘I don’t trust you’, though in many organisations it feels the other way around.

The final point to make on trust is that the most powerful thing a contemporary leader may do is to publicly fail inside (and outside) the organisation. By failing and communicating that failure, leaders make it OK to fail AND immediately create a different context for trust to exist in. It sets a new precedent and provides at least the promise that others in the organisation can fail too. This is powerful fuel for the creation of trust, because what it does is not only says but actually demonstrates that it is OK to be vulnerable in this organisation. Leaders fail first. In fact, that’s a nice slogan: Leaders fail first.

The ethics dimension is about behaving with integrity – and particularly about doing only what you would be happy the whole world knowing about if that email or decision was shared with the whole world. I’m sure there are great books on this whole topic – do we really need to describe ethics? You might think so, looking at some business people’s behaviour. But really, it is just about doing the right thing, all of the time. (Simple!).

4. Transparency  

Leading in a more transparent world demands different things from us. We can break these into two sub-categories: Informational Transparency and Emotional Transparency.

Leaders have always dealt with a higher degree of transparency than everyone else in an organisation, to the extent that they have always been highly visible, are subject to higher expectations than normal and are typically surrounded by and at the centre of a variety of competing influences and stakeholders. Clearly, this varies hugely from being a manager in a medium-sized organisation to being the CEO of a Fortune 500 multi-national or a leading politician.

This transparency has manifested itself in a variety of ways: from gossipy tabloid stories about personal lives to the fact that executives in publicly listed companies have their remuneration published openly to the whole world.

However, as we continue to discuss in this book, this transparency around information – not only rewards, but also performance, feedback and increasingly other more subtle data (think MPs expenses, or carbon footprints, or travel patterns) – is going to increase.

So as a leader, you must prepare for and cope with more and more information about you and your various impacts being open and available to others.

The emotional transparency of the coming age of leadership is perhaps the more demanding shift.

If the organisations that we lead in are becoming more conscious, more authentic and more open to dialogue and listening then we leaders must necessarily do so too. It will not be possible for the people in an organisation to take their risks and become more vulnerable and open at work if the leaders do not lead the way.

Emotional transparency requires leaders to be congruent: to actually act in accordance with their feelings no matter how unexpected that is. Can you image you or other leaders in your organisation saying any of the following to a group of your people:

•    “I’m scared about this and I don’t know what the answer is”
•    “I’m feeling sad”
•    “I need help, I’m lost right now”
•    “I feel like going home and hiding”
•    “When I look at this, I’m ashamed to be part of this organisation”
•    “I feel guilty because I haven’t done my job well in this area”

Yes, these are deliberately provocative. But what would it be like if people were more emotionally transparent at work more of the time, starting with the leaders? What is your biggest fear here, when you read through that list of proposed ‘acceptable things for a leader to say’? Are there benefits to this approach? What are the downsides and risks? And how emotionally transparent or ‘congruent’ are you?

5. Rewards

The rewards of leaders in organisations, particularly CEOs and the board, have been at the forefront of media and activist attention for a long time. Hopefully that pressure and attention will continue – it feels like their are some ugly wrinkles developed in the latter part of the 20th century that still need ironing out. Think about golden parachutes for failing CEOs, the lack of a relationship between value-creating performance and rewards more generally, the lack of transparency and rigour in setting of top management rewards including weak or non-existent remuneration committees, and so on. This, however, feels like it is in hand – the world knows about it and expectations and behaviours are gradually changing.

However there are two additional concerns that fit into the scope of this book: the ratio of top earners rewards to the rest of the workforce’s; and a shift towards recognising the value of non-financial rewards.

In a social business, the ingredients of a more empowered organisation and greater transparency result in a clearer focus on the inter-relationship between peoples rewards in the organisation. And in recent times, as the Occupy movement has reminded all of us, the rich have been growing richer and the poor poorer. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has actually grown. An awareness of this has led many progressive businesses to put in place formal ratios or to continually observe the ratio between the earnings of the lowest paid person in the organisation and the highest paid person in the organisation.

At the incredibly admired John Lewis Partnership in the UK, TK

TK Other research on ratios.

Secondly, to the topic of non-financial rewards. Right now it feels like most leaders only do it for the money, but there is rapidly growing body of interest around social enterprise, social business (in the Mohammad Yunus TK definition) and entrepreneurs and leaders doing what they do for a much higher purpose than the accumulation of wealth.

TK Khan quote

Having looked at motivations in the People chapter, we have already reminded ourselves that motivation at work is much broader and richer than the pay packet alone. What would it be like if we as leaders and the other leaders around us were all nourished by and talked about job satisfaction and the rewards we really enjoyed in a more open and nuanced way?

6. Communication / Realtime

In this networked world, both the demands on and opportunities for leaders around communication are increased. We are living in a world where the time between something of importance happening and the world knowing about it are increasingly the same – the buffer between the two are less and less.

There is less time to prepare the right message. There is less belief and trust in leaders generally, and so in the message itself there is an increased demand for authenticity and honesty. There is an always-on-ness to the world’s media, to the workforce with their BlackBerries and internal collaboration platforms (see Technology) so communication cannot be a one-off or occasional piece of work, but more a constant flow.

Consider how Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard described it in an interview with the New York Times: “I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer [which this book looks at in the Technology chapter], which is about all it takes. A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

The combination of these platforms, this growing culture and these expectations is a huge opportunity for all leaders as an outbound communication channel. But as much of the value for leaders can be in the inbound or dialogue aspect too.

There is a growing application of the concept of ‘people as sensors’. In a networked world, there are exponentially more opportunities to harness relevant, timely information, and for people and attention to gravitate towards which senor has the best available information at any given moment. As Brian Humphrey who was then working with the Los Angeles Fire Dept put it in a tweet: “Every soldier is a sensor. Every citizen is a contributor. Every resident is a reporter of #crisisdata”.

By using the communication landscape to their advantage, contemporary leaders can harness this huge opportunity to plug in to their organisational sensors, and both flow out and flow in realtime information to and from the rest of the business.

7. Support

The last aspect to leadership in a progressive 21st century business is putting in place the appropriate support for yourself and other leaders going on this journey.

The world is pretty much geared up to support the 20th century leader. The expectation is you’re a hero and an all-conquering expert, that you’re doing it for the money alone, that you do not and will not talk about your feelings (and may not even have them), that you will issue command-and-control dictats from your ivory tower, that you only want to hear good news, that you resist and dislike technology and – probably also – that you’re a man or behave like a man and are old and white.

If you are not these, life can be hard. The conventional support networks and the wisdom and advice available through conventional resources may not help you. You may find yourself feeling isolated and stupid – asking yourself ‘why am I doing this differently to everyone else – maybe I should stop trying to do things the long, hard, stupid way and just fall in line with everyone else’.

So to give yourself the best chances of success you must find or create a support network of people that do get this new world, that do belong to the community of changers striving for something different, who have walked the same alternative paths. For me personally, the single best thing I did on this front was go to WorldBlu Live 2011 in San Francisco and met over the course of 3 days a whole community of people motivated by the same things and with many of the same values. It was like coming home! It gave me faith that I wasn’t (that) stupid and certainly didn’t need to feel like it was only my organisation on that path.

Fortunately the world is changing. Our numbers grow! And there are radical shifts in the articles published by the blue-blooded business press (like Harvard Business Review), in the newly-celebrated CEO stars (like Vineet Nayar of HCL) and in the professional support available from accountants, lawyers and associations (like WorldBlu or The Employee Ownership Association).

By addressing and working on these 7 dimensions of leadership in the 21st century you will strengthen yourself over time. As you work at it, you will evolve in exciting ways. You will provide a subtle, powerful role model for those around you. You will become the future you want to see in the world.

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: ‘How do I go on this journey?’, with seven handy (but not easy!) practical next steps.

Thank you for your support.

Bon voyage, Will

Hello Shockers,

Quite excited about this next chapter, as leadership is much talked about and is certainly a vital part of the mix if we are to make big shifts in how businesses behave.

Please do keep the seriously useful feedback flowing and also spread the word.

Thanks – Will

—–

CHAPTER FOUR: LEADERSHIP

It is quite deliberate that the order of this book puts People before Leadership. In fact, it reflects both a switch from the contemporary sequence of leadership first, people second and a return to Julius Caeser’s long-standing maxim that ‘every soldier has a right to competent command’.

As General Patton put it: “There has been a great deal of talk about loyalty from bottom to top. Loyalty from the top to the bottom is much more important and also much less prevalent. It is this loyalty from the top to the bottom which binds juniors to their seniors with the strength of steel.”

But what defines a ‘competent command’ in today’s environment? And are we at risk of reverting to military models and top down thinking here? Having understood the challenges and opportunities around People, maybe it is clear that this contemporary organisation demands a substantially different type of leadership. This is an approach that will be hugely welcomed by the world, though it will take us all time to adjust and wean ourselves off some of the myths and folklore around leadership.

And is the contemporary leader actually new or is this just a rehashing of principles which have existed for millenia, simply dressed in the emperor’s new clothes? A little ‘realtime’ here, a little ‘networks’ there, but effectively the same as it ever was? I believe it probably is. This probably is a return to the fundamentals of human leadership, but perhaps a necessary recalibration and a shift in emphasis from where we got to in the late 20th century.

The challenge of leadership in the 21st century

The leader in a social business is walking a path that many of her peers before her will not have done. She may not be able to get advice as easily, or support from her stakeholders and investors as immediately.

One important note of caution: there is a great deal of folklore around leadership. Many, many books are published every year on leadership, building on an accepted canon of well-established management wisdom. I do not wish to add to that, and particularly not to the idea that leadership is beyond the many, the preserve of a few ‘special’ destined to become leaders.

So do not be intimidated by what follows.

You already lead, so you must already be a leader – at different times, and in different domains of your work and your life. Nobody does all of this well all of the time. Instead, these are ideas and possibilities about how you can continue to develop as a leader; and one who can help lead in a different world, changing their organisation, their team and themselves. That is all!

Leadership must change

If the behaviour of people in organisations is substantially shifting, then clearly so must leadership shift too. Why should we invest in this shift? Clearly there are the benefits of an unleashed and engaged workforce that were outlined in the previous chapter.

On top of this is a higher order of benefit. Can you imagine a world where leadership had transcended and evolved from the good and bad bits we found in the 20th century? Can you imagine the problems that will be solved in the world through the work of a new generation of leaders, working with purpose and vigour? Can you imagine what it will be like to be part of organisations alive with this kind of leadership? That is the prize, that is the why!

If we can gather and energise a whole generation of progressive leaders, what will the benefits be?

•    More organisations working towards Purposes of Significance, leading to a better world for all (seriously!)
•    Healthier, happier and more meaningful work lives for millions, if not billions
•    Fairer rewards for all participants in business, leading to a more resilient business community and a healthier society
•    Higher standards and demands for leaders in all walks of lives, and a new set of role models to help inspire and lead the way
•    Greater self-leadership in all

———–

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck.

Next extract: The 7 components of Leadership in a social business – nice and practical (hopefully!).

Thank you for your support through the wind and the rain. Off home for roast lamb now…nice one Mrs.

Tallyho, Will

Dear CultureShocker,

Kapow! Here’s the final part of Chapter 3 on People.

The aim of this chapter is to provide practical next steps for you and me, the prospective company-changers.

How well does it do that? Lemme know.

Go!

—-

So how can you evolve how your organisation interacts with its people?

Here are the four powerful practices suggested:

1. Creating strong values & principles
2. Celebrating personality
3. Enabling people development
4. Establishing freedom and trust

1. Creating strong values & principles

Having spent time studying companies that absolutely nail the People bit, it is clear that one characteristic that they all share is the clarity and belief around their values.

At the WorldBlu Live conference speaker after speaker from visionary companies outlined their crystal clear values, and what really comes through from organisations like Zappos and Gore are the values that are woven throughout the hold organisation: from ‘Create Fun and a little Weirdness’ at Zappos to ‘The ability to make one’s own commitments and keep them’ at Gore.

So what are the values that you want to imbue your team with? Or, better, what are the values that you together are willing to stand by, to hold one another account against and to really strive for in your work?

2. Celebrating personality

In the 20th century, being professional and being yourself were seen as different things. Being professional was not only about delivering against promised made and to a high quality, about being trustworthy. It was about being neutral (like the colour of old school beige desktop PCs!) and in doing so acting within some powerful puritan norms – a little polite laughter, no rough language (at least not at first) and definitely no weirdness. As for emotions, a professional didn’t show ‘em.

In the 21st century, when the alternatives to the job are a freelance careers, where the alternative to working in an office is working from home or in a co-working space, and in a century where people are realising that there’s more to life than work alone, these notions of professionalism are shifting. Hurrah for a return to personality!

What is clear about these progressive businesses that celebrate people is that they welcome and value personality, authenticity, emotion and humour.

This poses new challenges for us all. At our company we know it usually takes a new team member 6 months to really become themselves at work. And it poses challenges to you as a leader, whichever level you lead from. You must lead. You must be authentic, you must celebrate your own real self at work, and make it OK for others to do the same. Easy to say, difficult to do: particularly on bad days.

Sow can you start doing this tomorrow? How can you be more ‘you’ and encourage others to do the same? At scale, how will you institutionalise that? What practices will help it happen?

3. Enabling people development

In this chapter there is an underlying constant which is about enabling people to improve themselves. It is not enforced, and it is not only the slightly twee ‘personal development’ that you can find on your bookshop’s shelves under the title of PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT, but it is an ethos of allowing and enabling the organisation’s people to develop themselves both in their professional and especially in their personal aspects.

4. Establishing freedom & trust!

Perhaps the biggest ideas that 21st century organisations embrace are those of Freedom and Trust. BOOM. Big words, and kinda the diametrical opposite to the established cultures of most businesses. But isn’t that what we demand and expect today?

In Dan Pink’s fantastic TED talk he talks about the three aspects of motivating people as being Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. We’ve looked at how the three businesses in this chapter each extend significant trust and freedom to their people, and reap the rewards.

I guess the question for you is what can you do with freedom and trust in your organisation? Because they feel like the backdrop for and the shortcuts to this whole chapter. It’s what it all boils down to. Are you going to actually let them – the people – deliver great things?  And who – in your organisation – might not, and why not?

Acknowledging challenges

Before finishing this chapter, it would be remiss not to look some of the challenges around people in the contemporary organisation. There are three that we look at here:

Competition

Competition between peers does not necessarily lessen in a more enlightened business culture. In fact, my current belief is that it may heighten.

By opening things up, with greater transparency, less official hierarchy and a culture and practices which create much more feedback inside the organisation, it is possible that a quite ferocious meritocracy is created. ‘Great’, you may cheer! That may be so, but I believe I am working in such a place and dealing with some of the consequences of an environment where there is both an incredibly strong team ethic AND very high competition between peers. That is not easy. And for the team members themselves it can feel very stressful (and very motivating) to be part of an organisation where there is a relentless drive towards performance, with few places to hide.

Hearing Gore CEO Terri Kelly talking about how every Gore Associate (herself included) is ranked by their peers I cannot help thinking that one of the consequences of some of these ‘better’ people practices may be a tilt towards at times unhealthy competition which will need monitoring and counter-balancing.

This is worth looking out for, particularly when team members may be going through a life event or a phase in their life or career that does not naturally thrive in this environment.

Drowning in freedom and honesty

A related issue can be that in an organisation where there is greater fluidity, less definition around roles, less directive people management and a greater emphasis on feedback is that team members can end up becoming overwhelmed.

When there is little structure to hang on to, many opportunities to engage with and a high performing team to fit into, a new employee may end up drowning and become overwhelmed by the lack of structure and huge possibilities that exist.

Similarly, a new team member at NixonMcInnes described the environment as ‘like having the honesty volume turned up’. That can be tough to deal with at first if a person has become accustomed to a less honest, less authentic approach to communication and management information in a different organisation.

Some people want a 20th century job

Finally, perhaps some people will want a 20th century job. Maybe they do want to just do what they came in to do, to do the same thing for years, to know little about how they or the organisation is doing, and maybe that is OK. These kind of people – and they may even be you – do not want to sit around in a circle talking about their feelings, they do not want some kind of airy-fairy coaching from a ‘sponsor’ – they want a boss, and they want to be told what to do.

Recognising this fact is crucial. When the fit is not right, try to spot it early on – the signs will usually be there. In an environment where the individual cannot thrive, they cannot be really happy and they will sap your efforts. Be clear, and be sure to follow through swiftly – not everybody is ready for your enlightened ways! It’s better for them and for you if you recognise and act on that.

Summary

People are the lifeblood of any business. In this chapter, we have spent some time thinking about what it is that contemporary organisations do with their people to create real advantages. And there are many more practices available than those we have been able to cover in this book.

Fundamentally, what it boils down to is beliefs. If you believe that people are the first, the last, and the everything, then you can write your own chapter for your organisation, your business, your team.

People say that we are in a talent war, and that in business the best team wins. If that is true, then taking these next steps is the difference between whooping ass and being left behind. I know where I’d rather be.

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

The next chapter is on Leadership – often written about, often talked about, yet still so much to do… 🙂

Thank you for your support. Have a nice day. Do come again.

Here’s the section in the People chapter where I’m showing the reader some of the companies out there doing progressive, brilliant or odd things to help their people give their best at work.

It’s a section that excites me, so I really want it to be excellent – please give me feedback wherever you feel necessary.

Also, I’ve been reluctant to talk about NixonMcInnes – this book isn’t about promoting us as we are a tiny consultancy and as flawed as we are brilliant. But in the end it felt like the People practices we have just fitted into Culture Shock and obviously how we do things is material I know so well, so I whacked NM in. Let me know if you think that’s a bad thing or risks credibility somehow please.

Thank you.

—

So which businesses really celebrate and engage their people?

Zappos

Zappos should be a boring business, shouldn’t it? To massively oversimplify, Zappos is a website, a warehouse full of shoes, and a bunch of people answering telephone calls and enquiries. Dull. Like that beige colour that old school PCs were (or still are?). Yet Zappos may be the most colourful business making waves at the moment – thanks to its unique culture Zappos is all the colours of the rainbow, it’s a graffitti-spraypainted dancing unicorn with a beating heart and crazy eyes.

Zappos is essentially a business built around the principle that if you create the environment, hire the right people and so develop the right culture, you will thrive. And Zappos is delivering against that belief with a thriving business: widely recognised to the be the largest online shoe retailer in the US, it was bought by Amazon in 2009 for about $1.2bn, and is believed to turn over in excess of $1bn per annum.

For the whole story, you must read CEO Tony Hsieh’s book ‘Delivering Happiness. But looking at just a few of Zappos practices should help inspire us all.

Family

Zappos staff use the word family lots. Not just when they speak or write, but publicly on their website and in company materials and their annual Culture Book. The great thing is if you say you’re a family, then you have to live up to it. This is not ‘employee relations’ – the whole thing is powerfully reframed in a way that leads to an entirely different approach at Zappos.

Create Fun and a little Weirdness

Zappos has 10 Zappos Family Core Values. Core value number 3 is ‘Create Fun And A Little Weirdness’. I just love that! And this value clearly permeates everything that Zappos do: from their All-Hands meetings, to their office decor, through to their hiring processes. What could be further from the conventional brainwashing about how people should behave at work? We don’t want you to be ‘professional’, we want you to be WEIRD.

Reply-All hat

One of my favourite Zappos people initiatives in their Reply-All hat. You know that moment when, in a medium or large-sized organisation, you or someone you know unwittingly replies to ALL? Ouchy! At Zappos to celebrate that moment they have a Reply-All hat. Not just any hat, this is a gaudy, ridiculous plumed showgirl hat, and if you are unlucky enough to have Replied-All, you wear the hat and have to parade around the Zappos offices while being shouted and whistled at. You also are at risk of having photos taken, or even a video made! It is as brilliant and mad and awful as it sounds, and I for one wish our team was big enough to warrant one!

Zappos tours and Happiness Delivered

The Zappos culture is so potent that they are increasingly sought out to spread their ideas. They offer free, daily tours (and will even pick you up in a minibus from your Vegas hotel), and their inspiring CEO Tony Hseih has written a book called Happiness Delivered. They also now have a part of the business called Zappos Insights to provide training and consultancy services to other businesses.

Can you see how engaging the Zappos culture is to people like you and me? And also how straightforward it is – completely unlike traditional business, but completely human and immediately recognisable as fun AND smart ways to go about things? A great company.

W. L. Gore & Associates

W. L. Gore & Associates is quite a mysterious business. The makers of many innovative textiles including Gore Tex, the well known breathable waterproof fabric, the company has an extremely interesting approach to people and structure.

What must be said is that for Gore, these practices are not new. Though the ranting and railing in this book is against the staid, stupid mainstream management practices of the 20th century, Gore is a 20th century success – Bill Gore founded the business with his wife Vieve in the 1958! However, if we are able to spread them, then it will not matter how old they are for in most organisations these concepts, practices and the overall culture they create will be utterly new and very different.

Team size and lattice structure

One of the few things that is reasonably well known in the business community about Gore, which remains to this day a privately-held enterprise, is its unconventional practices around organisational structure which fifty years ago must have seemed genuinely bonkers, but today – though still unconventional – can seem much smarter.

Gore’s structure is made up of two particularly interesting components: their team size and their lattice structure.

Team-wise, the business operates very small plants – typically a maximum of 250 people in each. So for every 250 people the organisation has to provide a different building and replicate the same core structure that a single plant requires. We can safely assume that there are inefficiencies here in staff, in building costs, in equipment. Everything is replicated rather than lumped into the same ever-growing mega-plant! But in the words of their current CEO Terri Kelly, an engineer by training and only the fourth in Gore’s history, “we divide so we can multiply”. How does that work? The Gore organisation believes that it can unlock much greater innovation and engagement from its people by keeping smallness. In the mythology of Gore it is said that this was driven by the founder Bill Gore walking around a plant one day in 1965 and realising he didn’t recognise everybody any more. From then on he put in place a principle that no more than 200 people would work in the same building. The company’s growth record, enduring innovation and constant presence on ‘Best company to work for’ lists suggests they might have a point.

Even more radical is Gore’s lattice structure which shares more in common with networked organisations like Al-Qaeda, Anonymous and the Occupy movement than the traditional org chart.

In Gore, there are ‘few’ org charts and ‘no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication’. So how does work get done? How do people organise themselves? Put simply, how do they manage a multi-billion dollar global business without such structure?! As they say on their own website:

“Associates (not employees) are hired for general work areas. With the guidance of their sponsors (not bosses) and a growing understanding of opportunities and team objectives, associates commit to projects that match their skills. All of this takes place in an environment that combines freedom with cooperation and autonomy with synergy.” As CEO Terri Kelly put it in an enjoyable talk at MIT (link provided in the Further Reading section for your viewing delight at another time – or even NOW!)  “Associates vote with their feet”.

Utterly brilliant.

What does the 20th century manager say to this? ‘Pah! Must be like herding cats’ and reaches for her latte with a patronising disdain. Yet when so many organisations complain about their silos and their lack of collaboration, surely a little more fluidity might help? Isn’t this how the future looks? People, us, gravitating around the initiatives and projects we feel passionately need to happen?

Coaching

A quick note reinforcing the earlier point about coaching: Gore is small on Management with a capital M, and BIG on coaching. As we’ll look at later, Leadership in Gore is defined by ‘followership’ – if you don’t have an organisation mapped out beneath you, what do you have as a manager or leader? Influence. And every Associate (not employee, as they are keen to point out) at Gore has a Sponsor – that is, someone responsible for their success and usually someone outside of their day-to-day project work. This creates a big coaching culture.

‘Culture eats Bureaucracy for lunch‘

In her MIT talk current CEO Terri Kelly spoke throughout about the tension between the Gore culture and bureaucracy, and how their goal as the environment has become more complex is to keep driving out bureaucracy. Kelly also made the point that “with the right people, a few clear objectives and guidelines you don’t need a lot of rules”.

There is the famous quote from management theorist Peter Drucker that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. I propose a second: ‘culture eats bureaucracy for lunch!’.

NixonMcInnes

NixonMcInnes is the company that I am part of and helped found with my co-founder Tom Nixon. Like any organisation, we have very many flaws and we do lots of things very badly. I do not include us to present us as the finished article in any way – we are a small, focused consultancy just trying to find our own way in the world. However, if there is an area I do feel we are relatively good at, and that is the People bit, so with this caveat made, it felt relevant to share two of our less usual people practices.

Church of Fail

At a company away weekend in a farmhouse we’d hired in the Welsh hills, we split into groups to work on the company culture by developing initiatives that would not only benefit our company but also our clients’.

One group designed a little process to work on the idea of celebrating failure in NixonMcInnes. They developed the seed of their idea based on a stagecraft exercise that Matt Matheson in our team had experienced in his improv work to teach novice improvisers to accept applause and become better accustomed with feeling uncomfortable.

Out of this was born Church of Fail: a bizarre but powerful cultural ritual in our little company. Once a month, the boardroom at NixonMcInnes is converted into a non-denominational (!) church – with the chairs laid out in rows, all facing to the front where a sign of paper marks the ‘comfort zone’. On the wall behind the congregated audience is a poster with three instructions on it:

1.    How did you fail?
2.    What did you do about it?
3.    What did you learn?

One by one volunteers – and the whole thing is a little whacky so it definitely has to be voluntary – members of the group walk to the front, stand in the comfort zone and, looking at their peers, describe a time that they failed in the last period. Having described their failure, the congregation begin to cheer and clap loudly. It is both incredibly uncomfortable to be stood there at that moment and enormously amusing seeing your colleagues whooping and clapping uproariously at the best (i.e. Worst) failure you could remember. As much as the confessor wants the moment to end, so the applause continues way beyond the point of comfort. And then, when the group sense enough has been done, it tails off, and so their turn is done and it is on to the next volunteer.

What we hope this does is change our own perceptions of failure over time. It is hugely cathartic to socialize your biggest fail of the previous month in front of your peers, and I imagine it is good for our people to see all of us – regardless of our supposed importance or length of service – stand up and discuss our failures.

Communication Workshops

Another practice that we ran for about eighteen months was a rolling programme of Communication Workshops. Conceived and delivered by our excellent Finance Director Lasy Lawless who is also a trained therapist and our wise Chairman (now Non-exec) Pete Burden who has been working with and prototyping progressive business practices his whole career, these sessions were fairly simple in structure.

The group, again made up of volunteers, sat around in a circle in a private meeting space (for us, the boardroom). There would usually be 10 or so people, and Lasy or Pete as the facilitator would introduce  the basic ground rules and the ‘Three Core Conditions’ that we wished to practice:

•    Respect – for the other person as a human being, regardless of their behaviour
•    Empathy – experiencing the world as another experiences it (putting oneself in the other’s shoes)
•    Congruence – being appropriately open and transparent about one’s own thoughts and feelings.

With these principles in mind we would practice this ‘conscious communication’, talking as a group about awkward incidents and issues that had come up and how they had made us feel. If it sounds a bit like group therapy, it probably was but I really cannot say as I’ve never done therapy! (Not yet, anyway).

Over time, the groups fizzled out – I think this was for two reasons: that we all found them a bit weird in a work context and that overlap never felt entirely comfortable; and that they had to some extent served their purpose – everyone in the team has got better at communicating honestly and authentically. For some people, that is just little changes in how they speak and how they listen, and for others it has helped make big improvements in their communication with people at work, particularly under stress. For my part, I learnt lots and am glad we did it. I just need to remember to apply it!

Measuring happiness

Clearly one of the challenges for big business is to measure its contribution in more than financial terms alone. However, even for more progressive businesses there is a prickly challenge – especially when there is greater transparency around the company’s finances – which is that the more open the financial data, the more powerful and influential that data can become.

Imagine a company where every Monday morning every single team member is told exactly how much profit/loss the company stands to make that month and that year, how much cash is in the bank and therefore exactly what shape the company’s finances are in and what that means to each individual. For better or worse, that is what happens at NixonMcInnes every Monday.

It can be a horrible way to start a week. In our own efforts to balance the financial aspects of the business with other equally vital considerations we measure happiness every day.

Quite simply we have three buckets – one full of tennis balls, and then two buckets which start every new day empty: a happy bucket and an unhappy bucket. These are by the door to our office, and on the way out at the end of each day you pick up a ball and toss it in the bucket that best reflects your day. Simple.

On the door is a sheet, and we fill out the number of happy and unhappy balls every day as the week progresses. Anyone can count them up, it’s a pretty straightforward system. And then our office manager adds them to a spreadsheet. We now have happiness data going back to June 2010.

We believe this matters. We believe that in creating a currency around our mood, we put a marker down – it shows that it matters, it gives us a point of reference for discussions in teams and as individuals. It also provides a powerful self-awareness check: ‘why am I putting another ball in the unhappy bucket? What’s going on? What do I need to do or who do I need to talk to?’.

And for me as a manager it’s like a spring in the stride or a kick in the gut the minute I walk in the next morning. As I write this on a Sunday morning I see that on Friday we had 30% of balls in the unhappy bucket – that is not normal for a Friday, and I’m now conscious of it. I have realtime feedback about my team’s wellbeing, their mood – and I cannot hide from it. It is ambiently transmitted, for better or worse. It forces me and all of us to act (or to consciously choose not to).

—

How was that? Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

The next extract breaks down 5 or so practices that you – the reader – can implement in your organisation; finishing with a really practical ‘how to’.

Thank you!

Here’s the second extract from Chapter 3. Thank you so much for the useful comments and emails people 🙂

—-

How to unlock the potential in your people

To help you unlock more of these benefits in your team and organisation, we’re going to look at a set of five People levers that you can positively pull to jolt your organisation into the vanguard:

1.    Motivation
2.    Happiness
3.    Rewards
4.    Environment
5.    Management

1. Motivation

It might help if we take a step back and think about what really motivates people. It can be hard to connect with why on earth team members or customers might be motivated to go beyond their work being ‘just a job’ when people-centricity is not normal in the culture of your organisation.

From that cynical mindset, it can sound or feel a bit like this: ‘Why on earth would our employee want to do that – surely they just want to come in to work, go home and have an easy life, right?’. For some people that may be true, but wouldn’t you say that most people want to enjoy their work and achieve things that they can be proud of?

We have trouble in the business community remembering that there are broader motivations than money alone. Real trouble.

So perhaps it is useful to think about the possible motivations for a unpaid volunteer – someone who does what they do just because they do. Let’s imagine a fervent Wikipedian who has helped write several thousand entries in Wikipedia, has contributed hundreds of hours of her time unpaid, has worked almost entirely without management in the conventional sense, to unpick why people contribute to initiatives.

What would we say are her motivators? Perhaps she is motivated:

•    To help other people?
•    To share what she knows and cares about?
•    To express a passion?
•    To be part of something bigger?
•    To gain kudos and respect from others?
•    Because she simply enjoys it!?

Whichever of those it is, you know intuitively that in yourself these motivators are much more powerful than money alone. Consequently, tens of millions of hours of volunteer time has gone into the production of Wikipedia, a marvellous testament to what we can achieve when we work together, while many of us sat on the sofa watching TV.

And in writing this list it occurred to me that it was very likely that someone clever has studied this. A quick Google and I found The 16 basic desires theory – ta da!

Motivation: The 16 basic desires theory

Having studied some 6,000 people a certain Professor Steven Reiss proposed a theory that found 16 basic desires that guide nearly all human behavior:

•        Acceptance, the need for approval
•        Curiosity, the need to learn
•        Eating, the need for food
•        Family, the need to raise children
•        Honor, the need to be loyal to the traditional values of one’s clan/ethnic group
•        Idealism, the need for social justice
•        Independence, the need for individuality
•        Order, the need for organized, stable, predictable environments
•        Physical activity, the need for exercise
•        Power, the need for influence of will
•        Romance, the need for sex
•        Saving, the need to collect
•        Social contact, the need for friends (peer relationships)
•        Status, the need for social standing/importance
•        Tranquility, the need to be safe
•        Vengeance, the need to strike back/to win

With this in mind, what we need to ask ourselves in business is which basic desires am I calling upon in our people – which powerful underlying motivations can be harnessed to achieve of Purpose of Significance so that we can put a dent in the world?

Perhaps it also worth us pondering on this: which motivators have been poorly tapped in our organisation and more broadly in business in the past century? Which can we realistically address and call on?

2. Happiness

Perhaps the most radical change in how businesses manage people that is coming down the line is that borne out of the growing Happiness movement. Top tip: if you want to get a smile out of a 20th century business man, tell him that happiness is more important than profitability.

But this is no laughing matter. As referenced earlier in this book, whole nation states are suggesting that measures of happiness will succeed measures of financial productivity. We have outgrown the idea that money alone is the metric and the reason.

This rebalancing to take into account happiness and broader wellbeing is happening across society, and will eventually – and perhaps sooner than we expect – reach the shores of business. As it is we remain in a fairly sad and turgid state of affairs when it comes to happiness at work, with the annual (or in the more dynamic organisation, not once but twice a year! Let me hear you say ‘real time’). The HR community tot up the answers behind closed doors and then send back results to senior management, line managers, and sometimes, to the team’s themselves.

As Nic Marks puts it in his readable and very well-referenced ebook The Happiness Manifesto “The time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability.”.

This absolutely applies in a contemporary business. Later in this chapter will look at how other companies pull this lever and how you can too.

3. Rewards

All of the academic research says that money is a hygiene factor. It is terribly demotivating to not be earning ‘enough’, but when the vast majority of people reach an acceptable base level, increases in earnings are exponentially less effective in increasing personal satisfaction.

With this in mind, a powerful people lever we have in 21st century business is to reimagine the whole area of rewards – including but going beyond financial rewards and traditional ‘benefits’ alone.

Here the possibilities are endless, but to remind you of some of them, some organisations include non-financial rewards like:

•    Flexible working hours
•    Sabbaticals
•    Innovation time (Google’s famous TK%)
•    Duvet days
•    Free books (the Zappos library)

4. Environment

Something that smaller businesses and creative services businesses have tended to do much better than large and non-creative services businesses is recognise the impact and value of a positive work environment.

Positive role models feel alive, are comfortable, have a look of being lived in, and clearly value and prioritise the people working in them. People in these offices feel comfortable at work. It doesn’t have to be colourful beanbags, but you can generally tell when you walk around a place whether it is people-friendly or not, can’t you?

But, these working environments aside, the trend has been heading in the opposite direction.

CNN covered some research from the International Facility Management Association which indicates that the amount of physical space we give our people is drastically shrinking: “In 1994, the average office worker had 90 square feet of office space, down to 75 square feet in 2010”.

Inevitable in today’s climate? Perhaps, but does environment matter to business success? Absolutely. There is lots of research showing that everything from the colour of the walls to the number of likely interruptions massively affect morale, stress, engagement and as a result, the bottom line. Take for example research cited in a Wall Street Journal blog that was carried out by Joan Meyers-Levy from the University of Minnesota: Meyers-Levy looked at the relationship between ceiling height and thinking style and found that “when people are in a high-ceilinged room, they’re significantly better at seeing the connections between seemingly unrelated subjects”.

5. Management

The role of line management in actually delivering a contemporary approach to people management is crucial. It is in the nitty gritty of recruitment, day-to-day management and coaching and in performance reviews that many of the available benefits of a new approach to people management are either gained or lost.

The case studies we look at shortly provide many practical examples and bring the whole ethos of progressive management to life, but at this stage we can break out the three specific

•    Recruitment > Management
•    Coaching > Management
•    Feedback > Reviews

    •    Recruitment > Management

In the best run progressive businesses, more emphasis is put on the recruitment of team members than on their subsequent management. There is a belief in these businesses that if – in the words of Jim Collins in Good to Great – if you get ‘the right people on the bus’ everything else will sort itself out. So there is a big emphasis on multiple people being involved in hiring, in hiring being as much about values as about skills and experiences and in taking the whole processes of hiring patiently and thoroughly. Great recruitment lessens the burden of ongoing management.

    •    Coaching > Management

Secondly, once people are on board the approach of these pioneering organisations tends to be on coaching rather than formal management. That is to say, a style of working together which empowers, an approach which helps the individual to find their place, their role, their hidden talents, much more than telling them or placing restrictions or highly defined envelopes to work within. In a coaching culture, the logic in play is something like ‘most people want to be great at what they do, we spent good time finding them, now let’s work on unlocking their full potential’.

    •    Feedback > Reviews

Thirdly, the approach is to prioritise ongoing and very honest feedback over occassional and scheduled formal reviews. That is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but that these cultures tend to prefer the feedback to be continuous, to be in the context of every day work, and to be unusually honest and real. Remember some of HCL’s practices? And at Namasté Solar one of their main culture beliefs is in the importance of ‘FOH’ – Frank Open Honest communication.

Combined, these three elements make for a powerful new formula in people management.

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The next section will look at ‘Who does this well’, which I think you’re going to like.

Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

Thank you!

Hello and thank you for so many valuable contributions – everything from comments on the blog to links tweeted. Very grateful!

I have some work to finish off one small sub-set of the last remaining Democracy extract, so I’m hopping here to Chapter 3 which on People – a critical area…

This extract is the Intro, and will be followed by quite a lot of detail and practical steps in the following extracts.

Please keep the support, sharing and feedback coming 🙂

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CHAPTER THREE: PEOPLE

In theory people should be the great beneficiaries of business. After all, we’re people – we work in businesses, we own businesses, we created businesses and, for the most part, accept and depend on businesses.

So shouldn’t then people love business, and thrive in and because of business?

Instead business seems to be the enemy of people. It, this horrible machine we created, spits people out embittered, exhausted, demoralised on a daily basis and over years and careers.

We have all allowed for people and humanity and authenticity and real lives to be different to professionalism and work and business. We have allowed these two halves of the same sphere to be kept apart rather than held together.

Given this backdrop, we all know innately and absolutely that business must radically change how it treats people. We have all seen people around us be dreadfully mistreated by businesses and business people. We have all seen documentaries or read articles about the exploitation that happens to poorer people around the world at the hands of business to satisfy our own consumer needs and wants.

This. Must. Stop. It really doesn’t need to be this way.

Being bad to the people is being bad to the bottom line

Aside from the moral imperative to treat people better in business there are profound and proven business benefits going untapped. It is well understood by the Human Resources community that engagement translates into profit. It is well understood by managers that a great, motivated team member is worth five poor, switched-off team members. Yet we seem to do everything we can in conventional business to destroy engagement and to run roughshod over the simple opportunities to create

What a terrible shame! And yet what a huge opportunity. For people are the lifeblood of any business, and in the 21st century we are already seeing the pioneering social businesses celebrating and unlocking the abilities of their people and the people around them in ways that create powerful value.

What does the progressive business movement do differently?

The revolutionaries in this progressive 21st century business movement understand this opportunity instinctively and have subverted the ridiculous and staid logic of the last century to create powerful new ways of unleashing and empowering their workforces to create huge value.

Fundamentally, what the smartest organisations do is design themselves to create an environment where people can thrive and achieve more and feel stronger than they ever believed they could about their working lives.

These organisations place the highest premium on people. Not at a lip-service level, but at a deeply ingrained cultural level.

The newly created value that flows from this approach can be measured financially: better engagement of people translates into profits, sales, lower cost of returns, greater customer lifetime value and so on. But 21st century social business also create value for their people way beyond money alone. As the economist Simon Kuznets who originally developed the measurement of Gross National Product said back in 1934: “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” We can extend that and suggest that ‘the welfare of an organisation can scarcely be inferred from financial measures alone’. More of that later.

What’s the prize?

By making challenging but hugely rewarding changes, the following benefits are available to the 21st century social business:

•    Better, faster results through higher workforce engagement
•    Competitive advantage by nurturing innovation and creativity
•    Sustaining competitive advantage by attracting and retaining the very best talent in the hyper-competitive global marketplace
•    A lighter soul and greater wellbeing for all (from the bottom to the top of an organisation) from the knowledge that the business is doing the right thing by its people

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Feedback in comments here on the blog, twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck or email to wmcinnes@gmail.com.

PEACE!