Rod Collins's Blog, page 16

Alan Mulally’s Management Secret: Peer Accountability

by Rod Collins

 

With the retirement of Alan Mulally earlier this summer, Ford’s new CEO, Mark Fields, has a big set of shoes to fill. If he follows the lead of his predecessor and continues the management system that Mulally introduced, Fields is likely to take the automaker to even greater heights. In business, there are few things more powerful than a good management system. Fortunately for Fields, he has inherited a great management system.

When Mulally accepted the offer to become Ford’s chief executive in the summer of 2006, the carmaker was in the midst of a steady decline. Over the previous five years, Ford’s stock price had plummeted by more than half from more than $16 a share to less than $7. To solve its problems, Ford’s board of directors made what many auto insiders considered a bold move when they reached outside their industry and convinced Mulally to leave Boeing to become the carmaker’s new CEO. As the leader of Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes Group, Mulally had successfully taken on the formidable challenge from Europe’s Airbus Industrie by transforming the company into a lean and profitable enterprise. Ford’s board hoped Mulally would do the same for their ailing company.

The Problem is the System, Not the People

Upon assuming the leadership of Ford, Mulally brought a sense of focus that had been missing from the dysfunctional management team he inherited. Although his new board had given him carte blanche to revamp the leadership team, he advised them that he didn’t think he would need to replace many people. Mulally’s initial assessment of Ford’s failed management was that it was the system—and not the people—that was the problem. His solution was to use the peer accountability system that worked so well for him when he was at Boeing. At the heart of this system was a weekly leadership meeting he called the “business plan review” (BPR).

In these sessions, each member of the leadership team was expected to present a concise color-coded update of his or her progress toward meeting key company goals. Projects that are on track or ahead of schedule are colored green, yellow indicates the initiative has potential issues or concerns, and red denotes those programs that are behind schedule or off plan.

Initially, the leadership team resisted the BPR. They had important work to do and didn’t have time for these mandatory weekly sessions. They were used to working in their own fiefdoms, where their authority was unquestioned and they were in total control. Their notion of an effective leadership team was each individual leader doing his or her own thing and doing it well. In the old system, they kept to themselves and stayed out of each other’s way. And when Ford’s leadership team did gather together, they behaved more like fierce competitors than skilled collaborators. Mulally’s expectation that they would come together for weekly sessions where they would provide candid reports and be accountable to each other seemed like a crazy idea and a sure path to the unemployment line. It was not surprising that in those first BPR meetings, everyone on the leadership team reported everything as green.

The Breakthrough

One of the leaders who saw no value in the BPR was Fields, who protested to Mulally that he needed to keep focused on his business unit. Fields saw these meetings as a wasteful distraction from his real work.  Mulally remained firm in his resolve to introduce the BPR, asking Fields to trust the process.

In his book, American Icon, Bryce G. Hoffman relates the story of how Fields unwittingly provided the breakthrough that broke the resistance of the leadership team to the BPR process. Fields had been the obvious internal candidate for the CEO job when the automaker recruited Mulally, and given Ford’s culture of fierce competitors, Fields was sure that it was just a matter of time before Mulally nudged out his main internal rival. So, he decided if he was going to lose his job, he might as well go out “in a blaze of glory.” Fields’ unit had been working on a project that was in serious trouble, and he decided at the next BPR meeting, he would color it red. He stunned his colleagues when he made this bold—what some in the room thought was a career ending—move. But, it delighted Mulally, who seized upon the moment to engage the whole leadership team on how they could collaborate together to solve the business issue Fields shared with the group.

Mulally understood that the prime lever of an effective organization is a highly collaborative senior leadership team. Without this lever, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to have a collaborative organization. He was determined to transform Ford’s team of rivals into a team of collaborators. Fields bold move helped make that a reality.

Building Shared Understanding Means Spending Quality Time Together

Color-coded status reports provide a level of transparency that is sometimes absent from the usual numerical reports, and processing these visual updates as a team instills a discipline of peer accountability that is often lacking in leadership teams. The cadence of frequently gathering the whole team in one place to review all key initiatives helps create a shared understanding about the most important issues of the business. But more importantly, as happened in the case of Ford, it provides critical opportunities for the team members to synchronize their activities to help create extraordinary performance.

Mulally was adamant about the BPR process because he understood that the key dynamic for building a highly effective team is not a one-time offsite team-building event, but rather a frequent cadence where everyone on the team gathers in the same place at the same time for crucial business conversations. The quality of a team is dependent upon the quality of the conversation, and that means taking the time to build a shared understanding of the business by spending quality time together.

In implementing this practice, Mulally was very careful to maintain an environment where it was safe to candidly report the actual status of key activities. Mulally impressed upon the team that there was no value in status meetings where everyone reports that all is well—even when things are not—because people are more concerned with maintaining an image than dealing with reality. When members of a team have a process where they feel that they are accountable to each other and it is safe to tell the truth about the actual state of their projects, they provide themselves with the opportunities to assist each other to more quickly resolve critical issues when they occur. The primary purpose of peer accountability is not to create more pressure for individual performance but rather to identify opportunities for the team to leverage its collective strength. That’s the fundamental dynamic that defines a great management system.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

Alan Mulally’s Management Secret: Peer Accountability

by Rod Collins

 

With the retirement of Alan Mulally last month, Ford’s new CEO, Mark Fields, has a big set of shoes to fill. If he follows the lead of his predecessor and continues the management system that Mulally introduced, Fields is likely to take the automaker to even greater heights. In business, there are few things more powerful than a good management system. Fortunately for Fields, he has inherited a great management system.

When Mulally accepted the offer to become Ford’s chief executive in the summer of 2006, the carmaker was in the midst of a steady decline. Over the previous five years, Ford’s stock price had plummeted by more than half from more than $16 a share to less than $7. To solve its problems, Ford’s board of directors made what many auto insiders considered a bold move when they reached outside their industry and convinced Mulally to leave Boeing to become the carmaker’s new CEO. As the leader of Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes Group, Mulally had successfully taken on the formidable challenge from Europe’s Airbus Industrie by transforming the company into a lean and profitable enterprise. Ford’s board hoped Mulally would do the same for their ailing company.

Upon assuming the leadership of Ford, Mulally brought a sense of focus that had been missing from the dysfunctional management team he inherited. Although his new board has given him carte blanche to revamp the leadership team, he advised them that he didn’t think he would need to replace many people. Mulally’s initial assessment of Ford’s failed management was that it was the system—not the people—that was the problem. His solution was to use the peer accountability system that worked so well for him when he was at Boeing. At the heart of this system was a weekly leadership meeting he called the “business plan review.”

In these sessions, each member of the leadership team presents a concise color-coded update of his or her progress toward meeting key company goals. Projects that are on track or ahead of schedule are colored green, yellow indicates the initiative has potential issues or concerns, and red denotes those programs that are behind schedule or off plan.

Color-coded status reports provide a level of transparency that is sometimes absent from the usual numerical reports, and processing these visual updates as a team instills a discipline of peer accountability that is often lacking in leadership teams. The cadence of frequently gathering the whole team in one place to review all key initiatives helps to create a shared understanding about the most important issues of the business. But more important, as happened in the case of Ford, it provides critical opportunities for the team members to synchronize their activities to help create extraordinary performance.

In implementing this practice, Mulally was very careful to maintain an environment where it was safe to candidly report the actual status of key activities. Mulally impressed upon the team that there was no value in status meetings where everyone reports that all is well—even when things are not—because people are more concerned with maintaining an image than dealing with reality. When members of a team have a process where it is safe to tell the truth about the actual state of their projects, they provide themselves with the opportunities to assist each other to more quickly resolve critical issues when they occur. The primary purpose of peer accountability is not to create more pressure for individual performance but rather to identify opportunities for the team to leverage its collective strength. That’s the fundamental dynamic that defines a great management system.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

Digital Asset Innovation

by John Horodyski

 

“Without change, there is no innovation, creativity or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” — William Pollard

Innovation, an active process of introducing something “new” or “different,” involves a commitment to looking at the world differently and making the conscious effort to change. The decision to implement a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system can be an innovative moment in gaining operational and intellectual control of your digital assets.

DAM brings with it great responsibility for how the organization’s assets will be efficiently and effectively managed and is essential to growth. Any successful DAM implementation requires more than just new technology; DAM requires a foundation for digital strategy. Creating the whole DAM solution — and connecting it throughout your ecosystem — means that your digital assets can be part of this innovation by generating revenue, increasing efficiencies and enhancing your ability to meet new and emerging market opportunities for your users.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” — Peter F. Drucker

Innovation Starts at Home

Every strategy needs a foundation — that solid base upon which a structure rests and where meaning may be established. Many structures deserve attention and preparedness for the roadmap of work to be done when building the “House of DAM.” More importantly, these structures should all be reviewed 
and discussed well before any technology has been considered, let alone purchased. Technology should never lead the decision-making process for DAM — the business sets the foundation for strategy first. Technology is important, and the vendor review and selection process is a critical step in this process, but that step must follow the business requirements and digital strategy.

DAM encompasses the management tasks and technological functionality designed to enhance the inventory, control and distribution of digital assets. Digital assets include rich media such as photographs, videos, graphics, logos, marketing collateral. While most systems are initially required to house the large variety of media, DAM must also consider workflow surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets for use and reuse in marketing or business operations. The metadata or descriptive information embedded in the asset adds these processes and increases the asset’s value.

From
 IT staff to all users (past and present), keeping a record of what’s happened to the assets and how they were used will help inspire others who seek to innovate for their future use. Expanding markets and complex supply chains for digital images demand constant updating, rethinking and redesign of DAM. Innovative thinking is required to keep apace with the change.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs

Innovation Process

Drawing inspiration from Rod Collins’ book, “Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World,” there are five fundamental phases to the innovation and change management process that have a direct impact on how digital assets and DAM are understood and managed within an organization

1.     Understand What’s Most Important to Customers

Innovative leaders understand that the purpose of a business is to create customer value. The most effective organizations today are collaborative networks focused on delighting their customers.

The beginning of your DAM process must ask the question, “what’s most important to your customers?” Customer / user value is a moving target influenced by many factors both inside and outside the organization. This Initial Picture of the values influencing consumer choices and the developments that might reshape future market behavior will collate observations from:

Stakeholder Interviews
Market Analyses
Customer Segmentation Data
Industry Trends
Disruptive Developments
Financial Analyses
Winning Value Propositions

2.     Aggregate and Leverage Collective Intelligence

The most effective organizations are those that have the capacity to quickly access and leverage their collective intelligence. An effective method to process the Initial Picture with your staff is in a Collective Intelligence Lab, where a microcosm of your organization is gathered to:

Collectively process key information
Work cross-functionally in small groups to think holistically and expansively about new and different ways to achieve better results
Engage in innovative large group processes to identify the best solutions and their related requirements

This work results in an Innovation Portfolio, a strategic framework for proactively managing the growth of your company in a time of change whether that be for maintenance, incremental change, platform change or disruptive change

3.     Build Shared Understanding by Bringing Everyone Together in Open Conversations

People are more likely to enthusiastically implement what they create. Fostering co-creation can be achieved with Collaboration Work-Thru and Iterative Check-In sessions. A Collaboration Work-Thru is a facilitated meeting process that empowers a diverse group of individuals to:

Quickly co-create a shared understanding of the key requirements for effective delivery
Identify the key drivers of timely implementation
Assure that everyone in the organization is on the right page at the start of critical strategic initiatives or operational projects

The Iterative Check-In is a customized cadence for gathering cross-functional teams and updating the shared understanding as changes occur both inside and outside the organization.

4.     Focus on the Critical Few Performance Drivers

Information is power. An important part of effective change management design is making sure that people have the information they need to deliver extraordinary performance. In this phase a simple Focused Scorecard is created that serves as:

A powerful frame of reference for everyone to independently gauge progress
A communication tool to promote high engagement
A mechanism for aligning the distributed work throughout the organization with what’s most important to the success of your business

5.     Hold People Accountable to Their Peers

Peer-to-peer networks are far more effective than top-down hierarchies to innovate and collaborate at the level needed to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. In this final phase, you need to create customized Peer Accountability Metrics that:

Link individual compensation to collaborative action
Provide incentives for innovative contributions
Reward advancing business interests over individual interests

“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” —  J.K. Rowling

Building the
 Business Innovation Case for DAM

A focus on innovation can have many positive impacts on the DAM. Consider the following examples of what innovative effects a DAM may have on users and the organization as a whole:

Support strategic organizational initiatives
Serve as a resource to gauge changes in customer values
Reduce costs
Generate new revenue opportunities
Provide better brand management
Improve collaboration and streamline creative workflow or competitiveness
Enable marketing agility and operational excellence

Brand and market position — and the technologies to support brand success — are essential to any organization’s growth. In order to be successful, leadership will need (and want) to initiate and socialize an innovative process that starts slow and then works towards a bigger and larger end state. Ultimately, this can have
 direct influence in workflows — from packaging to engineering to licensing to social media to focus groups — with full realization of the DAM serving as the key repository, the single source of truth for your assets. Technology adoption can be overly complex and challenging at times, but that does not need to be the case.

In order to harness that potential power, the right people need to be enabled to make changes, create innovative opportunities with digital assets and align DAM with the strategic goals of the organization. Make sure this opportunity exists to stand back and ensure problems are being solved with this particular DAM solution.

“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” — Albert Einstein

Innovation and Change

Technological innovation results in a constantly evolving business environment as data sharing transforms the organization. DAM is central to this change. Information and all its data and digital assets have become more available, accessible and in some ways more accountable in business. We live in a “big data” world with so much data at our discretion and under considerable scrutiny from our content creators, users and stakeholders alike. Our organizations need to be change with the times and not only this, but respond well and be comfortable with our solutions.

Digital Asset Innovation Drives Your Brand

Content is still king, and the ability to strategically set the foundation for the kingdom and take control of your digital assets with DAM
 is within your reach. The demand for digital assets used for the design, production and distribution
 of content is not only quantifiably high, but also qualifiably, due to its necessity and criticality in current business operations.

Simply stated, digital asset innovation drives your brand. To get your digital house in order, know what your internal business units and external partners need, and understand how you will need to deliver assets today — and tomorrow — across multiple channels and devices. Creative professionals and those in marketing, communications, operations and other areas require content as a cost of remaining competitive and delivering what the consumer wants.

The ability to provide assets of high value and quality in a timely basis is no longer a wish, it is the expectation.
 Using DAM effectively can deliver innovation through knowledge and measurable cost savings, time to market 
gains and greater brand voice consistency — valuable and meaningful effects for your digital assets.

 

John Horodyski @jhorodyski is a Partner within the Media & Entertainment practice at Optimity Advisors, focusing on Digital Asset Management, Metadata and Taxonomy.

How Moore’s Law Is Ending Management As We Know It

by Rod Collins

 

As they struggle to find their footing in the unfamiliar landscape of a rapidly changing world, many managers are seeking refuge in change-management initiatives to navigate the new terrain. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that more than 75 percent of these initiatives fail. Perhaps that’s because the very notion of change management is probably an oxymoron. To think that you can manage change is to imply that you could somehow control change. Change is going to happen whether we approve of it or not. Quite simply, change is impervious to our attempts to manage it. When it comes to change, the central challenge is not about managing change. It’s about managing at the pace of change, and that is an entirely different proposition because the only way you can manage at the pace of change is to change how you manage. To understand why this is so, we need to understand a phenomenon that has come to be known as Moore’s law.

In the mid-1960s, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors that could be placed on a computer chip was doubling every twenty-four months. Said another way, our capacity to store and process information doubles every two years. Moore’s law explains why today’s average teenager has more computing power in her iPhone than the typical Fortune 500 company of the 1960s had in its multimillion-dollar computer center. It also explains why a nineteenth-century management model is unsustainable in a twenty-first century world.

If we were to graph Moore’s law for the period 1984 through 2014, we would find that the graph would start out linear until around 2004 when it would make an exponential turn. We suggest beginning with 1984 because that is the year Apple introduced the first Mac and transformed the computer from a piece of high-priced institutional equipment into an affordable household appliance available to the masses. If we define our computing capacity in 1984 as one unit and then double that amount every two years, we would find that our capacity to store and process information today is more than 32,000 times what it was in 1984. To highlight how rapidly the technological revolution is reshaping the business landscape, in 2016 that capacity will grow to more than 64,000 times when compared to 1984.

Moore’s Law captures the dynamics of our journey between two very different worlds and serves as an analogy to explain where we have been, where we are going, and why what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow.

Between 1984 and 2004, Moore’s Law would be essentially a flat, linear line. Thus, if you were a manager in 1995 and were responsible for planning and delivering specific business results for 1998, you would analyze all the available data at your disposal for the period 1990 through 1995. You would thoroughly study all the dynamics and the relationships among the key factors that would guide your decisions in planning for what you would need to do to meet your 1998 goals. With this knowledge, you would do what other successful managers had done for decades. You would forecast the future based on your thorough analysis of the past, and chances are highly likely that you would indeed deliver on the results because1998 would be a linear extrapolation of the period that precedes it.

For the past century, the way we’ve managed our businesses has been based upon two fundamental assumptions that have been rock solid for all that time. The first assumption is that the past is a proxy for the future. This explains why the professional practice of management has been so data driven. In a linear world, when management’s job is to create the future, the secret sauce is to understand and then extrapolate from the past. The second assumption holds that the smartest organizations are those that leverage the intelligence of their smartest individuals. Accordingly, the dominant and near universal structure for both private and public sector organizations has been the top-down hierarchy, where the few at the top direct the activities of the many, based on the belief that the whole organization becomes smarter than it would otherwise be if the workers were allowed to follow their own judgments.

However, If you were a manager in 2005, accountable for meeting specific business goals in 2008, and you built your business plans on the extrapolation of your analysis of the period 2000–2005, chances are highly likely that you would miss the mark because 2008 is not a linear extension of the period 2000–2005. That’s because, after 2004, Moore’s Law becomes exponential.

The significance of Moore’s law is that it demonstrates that we have been rapidly and suddenly thrust into an exponential world in which the rules are very different. In our exponential world, many managers are painfully discovering that the past is no longer a proxy for the future, and they are reluctantly learning from the remarkable successes of innovative businesses—such as Google, Linux, and Wikipedia—that the smartest organizations are now the ones that know how to aggregate and leverage their collective intelligence by designing organizations not as top-down hierarchies but as powerful collaborative networks.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

Is A Dual Operating System the Solution for Managing In a Faster Moving World?

by Rod Collins

 

The single greatest challenge facing every business leader today is how to effectively lead organizations in a time of relentless change. As we’ve learned from the publishing and recording industries, no business model is safe when once popular brands such as Border’s and Tower Records can suddenly vanish from our shopping malls. We have also discovered that new brands in industries that didn’t even exist a mere fifteen years ago, such as Google and Facebook, can achieve levels of success far faster than anyone thought possible. Whether they like it or not, business leaders need to come to terms with the uncomfortable reality that the rules that worked in the relatively stable twentieth century may not apply in a twenty-first century world radically reshaped by the digital revolution. If managers want to manage at the pace of accelerating change, they will need new solutions.

John Kotter’s latest book, Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster Moving World is a timely guide for business leaders who are open to management innovation. According to Kotter, businesses have trouble keeping pace with the speed of change because their hierarchical management systems are designed for efficiency rather than strategic agility. While hierarchies can be workable structures for the tactical challenges of running large enterprises, they are limited in their capacity to quickly spot hazards and opportunities, nimbly formulate strategic options, and rapidly execute responsive action.

The problem with hierarchies is that strategic work has traditionally been limited to a small number of people at the top. This is a serious handicap because, as Kotter points out, mastering the challenges of relentless change requires “a radical increase in the number of people involved in creating and executing strategic initiatives.” In addition, the longstanding habit of doing strategic work in yearly cycles is problematic in a world where hazards and opportunities that can make or break the business can happen on any given day.

Kotter’s solution for a more dynamic approach to addressing the challenges of rapid change is the adoption of a dual operating system. This is accomplished by creating a second agile network structure that complements the traditional hierarchical organization.  This second structure is not a cross-functional task force that reports to an executive champion, but rather a relatively autonomous system that is free from the usual bureaucratic processes that slow organizations down. The participants in the network are drawn from and continue to work in the hierarchical structure and serve as the catalysts for maintaining the necessary synergies between the two systems.

The key attribute that drives the effectiveness of the network is its lack of bureaucratic barriers. There is no ascription of authority in the network. Thus, anyone can propose an idea or an initiative, and no one has the wherewithal to unilaterally impose his or her will upon the network. All participants are equally empowered to build a consensus around their ideas. If one can garner the voluntary support of enough people, the network provides a powerful opportunity to rapidly develop an idea into a well-formulated strategic proposal for consideration by the company’s leadership team. Because the participants in the network are also part of the hierarchical delivery structure, key requirements for implementing a new idea are integrated into the iterative development of the strategic initiative, increasing the chances that innovations are not only rapidly formulated but are also rapidly deployed.  This enables organizations to be both adaptive and productive.

Kotter points out that, while a dual operating system might seem like new idea, it is actually a common occurrence in the evolution of many, if not most, companies. That’s because most start-ups are initially organized as informal networks. As they begin to experience rapid growth and the need to adopt a more sophisticated management structure, most companies evolve into conventional hierarchical organizations. Kotter’s key insight is that, as a company transitions from a network to a hierarchy, there is a brief period in this natural evolution when both of these systems are operating at the same time. Kotter’s proposed solution is designed to harness the dynamics of this transitory phase into a more permanent modus operandi.

The linchpin that makes this arrangement work is the CEO, who serves as the steward for both systems, making sure that they are equally balanced, sufficiently autonomous, and most importantly, effectively interdependent. This stewardship enables the two systems to coexist in an organic relationship that supports both adaptability and productivity in responding to the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

While Kotter’s solution is a workable solution—even a necessary solution for many deeply entrenched bureaucracies—it is, in all likelihood, not a sustainable solution precisely because it is so dependent upon the stewardship of an enlightened CEO. What happens when the CEO moves on and is replaced by a successor who firmly believes in “old school” management? More likely than not, as we’ve learned from GM’s mishandling of its successful Saturn unit, we can expect that once innovative leaders move on, the higher performing networks they built will run the risk of being quickly demolished by the remaining bureaucrats who see no value in any structure that they can’t directly control.

Nevertheless, Kotter’s dual operating system may be the only practical short run survival solution for companies with long hierarchical histories. It is unrealistic to expect a decades-old traditionally organized company to transform itself into an Amazon or a Zappos overnight. Before traditional companies can learn new ways of operating, they must first unlearn the old ways. The dual operating system is a useful transition strategy for accomplishing both the learning and the unlearning. As a long-term solution, however, the dual operating system may be problematic because collaborative networks not bureaucratic hierarchies are the future of management. Any major company created in the foreseeable future is far more likely to be organized like Google than General Motors.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin first built their company, they were very proactive in making sure that Google had little, if any, hierarchical structure. They understood that, in a world radically transformed by the digital revolution, networks have become smarter, faster, and most importantly, more adaptive than hierarchies. This is the ultimate lesson that every organization needs to grasp to survive in a faster moving world. While a dual operating system is not a permanent solution for managing in a faster moving world, it is a good start for traditional business leaders who have the will and the courage to begin the job of transforming their legacy organizations into highly adaptive twenty-first century enterprises.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

The Greatness of Information Governance

by John Horodyski

 

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.” — Abraham Lincoln

Governance is good — in fact, it is great. Governance, and specifically IT Governance, is defined as, “putting structure around how organizations align IT strategy with business strategy, ensuring that companies stay on track to achieve their strategies and goals, and implementing good ways to measure IT’s performance. It makes sure that all stakeholders’ interests are taken into account and that processes provide measurable results.”

Governance helps us define the rules of the Digital Asset Management (DAM) road — a framework to ensure that program goals are met during implementation and in the future. Governance is the best way to manage and mitigate risk if it starts with a roadmap to ensure success of implementation during the first iteration and measurement tools to become formalized in the operating model. By developing a project charter, working committee and timelines, governance becomes an ongoing practice to deliver ROI, innovation and sustained success by building collaborative opportunities.

Participation from all levels of the organization is key. In particular, engaging the leadership by involving them in the big decisions, holding regular reviews and keeping them talking about DAM, will yield the greatest the benefits from DAM. IT Governance is the best way to manage change from implementation to maintenance of the technology itself.

However, we have reached a time in our history when we must implement Information Governance in order to move our information into the future. This is something that is both more holistic and equally, more specific than IT Governance and needs to address the data and information throughout your organization. Information Governance is the structure around how organizations align information management beginning with metadata, taxonomy, policy development, stewardship and technology to serve the creation, use and distribution of information.

The decision to implement a DAM system is the right step in the right direction to gaining operational and intellectual control of your digital assets, and it is to be taken seriously. Any successful DAM implementation requires more than just new technology — DAM requires a foundation for digital strategy. Creating the whole DAM solution and connecting it throughout your business means that assets can generate revenue, increase efficiencies and meet new and emerging market opportunities.

DAM is more than a sum total of its parts. Digital Asset Management must include a detailed review and analysis of all the contributing factors: digital assets, organization, workflow, security, etc. It takes a considerable effort to get everything in its place — there is no magic here.

“Corporate governance is concerned with holding the balance between economic and social goals and between individual and communal goals. The governance framework is there to encourage the efficient use of resources and equally to require accountability for the stewardship of those resources. The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society.” — Sir Adrian Cadbury, Chairman of Cadbury and Cadbury Schwepps.

People, Process and Technology

 Governance in the context of information is the ongoing practice of making and setting information policy, establishing standards and making decisions that will be enforced to achieve a unified, coherent information discovery experience. The goal of such governance is to:

Manage digital assets with Digital Asset Management (DAM)
Federate and manage metadata
Manage people, process and technology to support metadata standards

The governance structure establishes the strategic, operational and technical decision-making process required to ensure the DAM team excels in its mission. DAM governance provides strategic leadership, establishes priorities and policies, and is accountable and transparent to the organization. In addition, the governance standards should include a core metadata standard, proscribed workflows and lastly, governance practices that will be carried out on an ongoing basis.

Information Governance Practices

 Every organization has a different culture and will naturally take a different approach to Information Governance and how it is applied within an organization. Content owners must be engaged in upholding standards of practice and actively participate in the ongoing development of the taxonomy, metadata standards and governance practices to ensure the continued success of the enterprise search experience. The following elements must be maintained and updated with the site content:

Metadata

 Metadata, simply stated, is information that describes other data — in essence, data about data. It is the descriptive, administrative and structural data that define your assets.

Descriptive metadata describes a resource for purposes such as discovery and identification (i.e., information you would use in a search). It can include elements such as title, creator, author and keywords
Structural metadata indicates how compound objects are put together, for example, how a digital image is configured as provided in EXIF data, or how pages are ordered to form chapters (e.g. file format, file dimension, file length)
Administrative metadata provides information that helps manage an asset. Two common subsets of administrative data are rights management metadata (which deals with intellectual property rights) and preservation metadata (which contains information needed to archive and preserve a resource).

Controlled Vocabulary

 A Controlled Vocabulary is for drop-downs/pick lists. The use of “preferred terms” is a good way to provide authority and consistency to digital assets. Each tag could point to a different topic, but, fundamentally, it’s the same principal element of the subject under review that is relevant. If the topic is “Country,” and you only have eight countries with which you work, then those eight countries are your controlled list. Control, and stronger yet, authority, is needed to describe your assets. You need to know what it is you are describing and how it may best be described.

Content owners should create a retention policy and retention schedule that quantifies the lifecycle of the asset. Because content varies in its nature, timeliness is a relative term, and site owners need overarching rules that define retention decisions. In order to succeed, people and /or teams will need to review portions of site content monthly for duplication, version control, re-use rules and archiving. Annual review of all site content sections for general timeliness and relevance, archiving and removal and adjusting the retention policy and schedule is also a good practice.

Taxonomy

 Taxonomy is the classification of information into groups or classes that share similar characteristics. It is a way to organize information to best solve a business problem based on user needs by exposing relationships between subjects. A well-designed taxonomy brings business processes into alignment, allowing users to intuitively navigate to the “right” content.

The best reason for creating and implementing a single, standard taxonomy across the enterprise is that it provides good business value. But more than that, it enhances and improves enterprise search and enables quick information discovery. Taxonomy provides the consistent and controlled vocabulary that can power the single source of truth as expressed in a DAM or CMS. It is a key enabler for organizing any large body of content. It is required for meaningful information management and critical to effective “findability.”

Information Governance Process

 There are seven steps to effective Information Governance:

1. Governance Process — Create Governance Council, Process and Guidelines

Create and Align Processes, Requirements and Controls
Creation of a Governance Council — DAM Governance Council to develop and maintain the metadata, taxonomy for the DAM and associated systems. Core council is comprised of core stakeholders across different departments within Communications and represent issues brought to them by others in their area.
Governance Communication Plan — Governance Council decisions are recorded for future reference to understand the context of decisions and to note the timeframe of terminology changes (e.g., After Q3 of 2013, “layout” was changed to “template” and “template” will be used going forward).

2. Establishing Decision Rights and Accountability

Approval Processes — All decisions are made by the Governance Council with zero tolerance of “ad hoc” or “quick fixes.”
Data Stewards — It is recommended to have individual “Data Stewards” serving as data owners for his /her individual departments / plants. A Data Steward is someone that is responsible for maintaining a data element (controlled vocabulary, etc.) in a metadata schema.
Requirements Gathering — Data Stewards will help define data and specify data quality requirements for existing DAM functionality and for future functionality. Some examples of data quality issues include controlled vocabulary creation for: Full Sun, full sun, fullsun, f sun, etc.

3. Performing Stewardship

Messaging — Regular communications and updates are recommended for monthly and quarterly updates both “in-person” where possible and virtual (email, presentations, videos in DAM, etc.)
Change Management — Data stewardship is evidenced by changes to the user interface: functionality and graphical (e.g. thumbnails), keyword changes, search term modifications, and new metadata models / user types added
Collecting Performance Metrics — It is recommended to have regular reporting on DAM user statistics

4. Managing Change and Issue Resolution

Authority — Only the DAM administrator(s) will be able to make changes to the metadata models configuring the system.
Change Requests — Any requests to “change” any of the functionality and/or business logic behind the DAM must be formally requested via a Change Request Form made available to users from the DAM.
Change Review — The change(s) will be reviewed on an as needed basis depending upon the volume of requests.

5. Building Governance Into Technology

Involving IT — Nominate a member of IT to the Governance Council
Mapping Corporate Systems — Information Management is a corporate issue, not just an IT issue
Managing vendors — Chair of Governance Council to maintain metadata / taxonomy vendor management ownership.

6. Stakeholder Care and Support and Stakeholder Communications

Keeping in Touch — In addition to bi-weekly meetings, there should be monthly and quarterly reports
Gathering Feedback — It is recommended to have quarterly reviews with user groups for 1:1 feedback
Measuring and reporting — Define value will to maintain active users and bring new business opportunities for the DAM.

7. Metadata and Taxonomy Governance

Keeping the metadata relevant — The taxonomy and metadata specifications as terms and vocabularies must change over time.
Using metadata to control the information across the enterprise and assure accuracy and authenticity by

Documenting / mapping the existing databases and their associated workflows in order to effectively manage technical, functional and business changes — one specification change in one database may well affect the entire workflow.
Ensuring the Governance council owns, maintains and updates the master copy of the documentation and specifications.
Evaluating and assessing the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) of the DAM, Taxonomy Navigation, Taxonomy, etc. on a regular basis (e.g., quarterly).
Monitoring the landscape — Start simple and add if required, be aware of the competition and how they name / categorize products, be sensitive to political and cultural viewpoints.

“Organizations need to practice qualitative corporate governance rather than quantitative governance thereby ensuring it is properly run.” — and “You cannot legislate good behaviour.” — Mervyn King, Governor of Bank of England

Key Practices of Information Governance

 The benefits of Information Governance practices address the tenets of information strategy and information management as it affects people, process and technology. It focuses upon the value of having reliable metadata, taxonomy, policy development and stewardship with technology.

Metadata Governance

Management of metadata and taxonomy on an enterprise level, enforcing global content stewardship by means of controlled vocabularies on the site level.

Metadata Stewardship

Formalization and accountability over the management of data, metadata and taxonomy by site content management and ownership.

Create Pro-Active and Re-Active Governance

Establishment of Information Governance into existing systems like new internal technologies, websites and SharePoint sites. Also build data governance stewardship into data quality methodology, and build data governance stewardship into issue resolution process.

Performing Stewardship

Data stewardship is evidenced by the response to and ongoing updates to keywords and search terms, as well as additions of new metadata models and user types.

Building Governance into Technology

Need representation from IT on the Governance Committee (Information Management is a corporate issue, not just an IT issue).

Conclusion

 DAM is not a project; it is a program. By definition, a project has a finite beginning and end, and a DAM requires considerable attention and governance at all stages and by all stakeholders. In this way, governance 
is the process, that helps you to ensure that when the initial phases of the DAM initiative are accomplished, you’ll have the opportunity to seek further capital and share the next generation of business valuation with executives.

Assessing health in governance is one of the most telling indicators and accurate predictors of enterprise DAM success. Every organization needs a way to ensure that the creation, use and distribution of information sustain the organization’s strategies and objectives. Information Governance is that qualitative and quantitative method to manage the greatness of information.

 

John Horodyski @jhorodyski is a Partner within the Media & Entertainment practice at Optimity Advisors, focusing on Digital Asset Management, Metadata and Taxonomy.

The High Cost of Assuming Enterprise Search Works Like Google

by Mindy Carner

 

A common mistake when seeking to improve access to content across the enterprise is assuming that intranet systems will act as “Google for the enterprise.”  Unfortunately, this assumption is incorrect because the technology that Google employs is designed for the World Wide Web, not for an intranet. This means that the algorithms, measures and tricks that search engines use to rank your website cannot be mirrored for internal content.

The following list describes several elements of the internet search engine puzzle, and why they do not apply to internal search applications. 

Inbound links: The value of a web page is a function of the number of other websites that link to it. Arguably, the more sites that link to yours, the more likely it is that your content is good and trusted. The more credible a web page’s content, the higher its ranking in search. This algorithm simply does not apply to intranet content that does not have such wide variances in quality of content.


Click-throughs: Web search engines also use click-throughs to determine ranking for a page. The more times that people click through your link on a given search, the higher that link will rise in the ranking. This algorithm is also absent from intranet searches.


Structured data: The collection of web pages that constitute the bulk of content on the World Wide Web is called structured data. That’s because the data is organized using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which categorizes the web data using tags that can tell a search engine what’s a title, what’s a header, and what’s plain old paragraph writing. HTML also includes keywords, descriptions and much more structured markup that a savvy page creator can use to tell search engines what their web page is about. Because intranets rarely, if ever, have sophisticated organizing mechanisms, they produce copious amounts of unstructured content. This includes your Office documents, PDFs, OCRs, and other digital assets that have no formal structure to their content. This lack of formal structure makes for unstructured data, and poor search results.

The danger in not understanding this vital difference between enterprise search applications and internet search engines can lead companies to invest thousands of dollars in a technology solution that will underperform unless they also invest in the people, processes and metadata necessary to transform unstructured data into structured data. Without these additional investments, an off-the-shelf technology application is likely to yield nothing more than a very expensive keyword search.

For an in-depth look at how taxonomy fills in the gaps of an enterprise search solution, please read the Optimity Advisors Orange Paper “Enterprise Search and Taxonomy: Filling the gaps of an out-of-the-box enterprise search solution.” 

 

Mindy Carner is a Senior Associate in the Media and Entertainment practice at Optimity Advisors

When Video Rights Go Wrong

by Julia Goodwin

 

Your company has a contract for a video you’ve bought or sold.  All the terms spelling out your rights are there in black and white.  They’re good rights, too, and you’re glad you got them.  But then something goes wrong.  It seems that over time the rights were somehow separated from the video they were defining.  Putting the two back together again after so many hands have touched the video and its rights appears to be a daunting challenge.

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all prescription for managing video rights in any organization.  From the small production company to the large media conglomerate, “right-sizing” your video rights landscape and its health is a subjective question that depends on the needs of the organization, its workflows, its business focus.  If all’s well, then a company’s video rights are tracked, it can share rights information when it needs to, it bills (or gets billed) properly for its distribution agreements, its assets are protected, and it can let go of most of its video rights anxiety.

If you’re not sure how your company is doing, here are some warning signs that your video rights may have gone wrong:

Internal consumers of rights (especially salespeople and derivative product divisions) complain about the amount of time it takes for them to get rights information
Your external participants complain they don’t get paid on time
You’re not sure if the royalties checks you’re getting are accurate
You have boxes of material that you’ll get around to cataloguing and monetizing some day when you have extra budget
You’re not sure how far out into the world your content has gone…without your knowledge or permission
You have multiple systems managing your video rights information

These are just a few of the most dramatic and painful symptoms of video rights gone wrong. With the proliferation of distribution channels for video and the monetary opportunities they bring, having a strong video rights ecosystem will ensure your company’s long-term success. 

Companies invest heavily in systems and integrations to create or buy content, describe it, store it and send it out the door.  Recently, it has become increasingly important to think carefully about the way video rights weave throughout those workflows, systems and integrations.  This exercise will raise improvements to workflows and can introduce innovative new systems that can optimize a company’s time to market by knowing what it can use and protecting its content from misuse.  A company can have thousands of videos in its Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, but if it doesn’t know how it is allowed to use them, what are these assets really worth?

Earlier this year, we learned how videos and their rights can be a timeless asset, especially for nostalgia buffs.  Thanks to a blog posted by the Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this year, baseball aficionados were treated to a lost moment in our national pastime when video footage of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig from 1925 in the Fox Movietone archive at the University of South Carolina made headlines around the world.  Actually, this clip had been in the university’s archive for many years and had even been previously licensed.  Suddenly, sparked by the blog, this video lit up the media for days.  It’s interesting to draw a parallel to a company’s video catalog.  Could a company glean its archives for such videos and related rights?  Could licensing older content create new interest and income, supported by social media? It’s exciting to think about the creative ways a company might make its video rights go really right.

Knowing the state of a company’s videos and the related rights is critical to a company’s efficient and proactive video ecosystem.  To learn more, see the Optimity Advisors Orange Paper on Video Rights 

 

Julia Goodwin is a Senior Manager within the Media & Entertainment practice at Optimity Advisors.

The Enablers of Great Work Cultures

By Rod Collins

 

The recent mismanagement scandals that have plagued General Motors and the Veterans Administration are unfortunate examples of what happens when work cultures go awry. The silence that prevailed among the many who were aware of the deep problems in both of these organizations offends our human sensibilities. Why didn’t more people speak up sooner? How could so many passively sit on the sidelines while people literally were dying because of their organizations’ flawed operations? What caused these two organizations to create cultures that seemed to bring out the worst in so many people? And how can we make it better so organizations are designed to bring out the very best in all their workers?

For more than fifty years, we have known that participative management—where managers deeply respect their employees and empower them to do their very best work—is far superior to top-down, “keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told” command-and-control management. Beginning in the 1960s with Douglas McGregor’s identification of Theory X and Theory Y and with Abraham Maslow’s penetrating insights into the higher reaches of human nature, we have understood that when managers involve employees in defining the work to be done, the workers are more engaged in their efforts and more committed to excellent performance. Unfortunately, this knowledge has had little real impact on organizations. When it comes to implementing the insights of the human relations discipline spawned by McGregor and Maslow, management’s accommodations, until recently, have been far more about style than substance.

Creating Great Workplaces

Despite the recent misadventures of GM and the VA, substantive change is beginning to take hold in some management circles, and it’s not coming from the insights of the organizational specialists or the usual management players, but rather from the innovative practices of a rather unlikely group: engineers. The current #1 company on Fortune magazine’s list of the “Best Companies to Work For” was founded by two engineers, and the world’s first bossless company—W. L. Gore and Associates, a perennial presence on the Fortune list—was also started by an engineer. The Agile Management movement, which has revolutionized software development by leveraging the power of collaboration, was started by a group of software engineers. And it was an engineer who created the first wiki, which became popularized with the rapid growth of Wikipedia. How is it that engineers, who are not normally known as the champions of the “touchy-feely” have had more success than the human relationship experts when it comes to effecting real change in the way management works?

One group that may be interested in the answer to this question is the pioneers who have banded together to champion the Great Work Cultures initiative. Their mission is “to create deep, broad workplace culture change so that all workers can expect and experience a respectful work environment.” The group’s tagline is “Moving from Command and Control to Respect and Empower.” Their hope is that by banding together, they will create the gravitas that will result in a new norm for workplace cultures. Implicit in this notion is the expectation that this new norm will radically transform the way individual leaders think in leading the work efforts of their employees. As the group pursues its noble purpose of reinventing management on a large scale, it may benefit from understanding how the engineers have been successful in bringing substantive change to management.

Discovering the Key to Great Performance

About the same time that McGregor and Maslow were expanding our understanding about human motivation in organizational work, W. Edwards Deming was introducing systems thinking into the practice of management. An engineer by training, Deming recognized that the dysfunctional behavior that often plagues top-down organizations is more likely to result from the dynamics of the overall management system than from the behavior of individual managers. Thus, he cautioned managers that when most of the people engage in the wrong behavior most of the time, the problem is more likely the system not the people. This may explain why the engineers have been so successful in creating organizations known for their great cultures.

Engineers tend to think in terms of systems. They understand that system design is the key to great performance. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google, they didn’t just build a great search engine; they also built a great company. As they designed their organization, they were very mindful that they were not going to build another top down bureaucracy that amplified the voices of the few and silenced the many. Instead, they would build an organization that, like their search engine, would leverage the collective intelligence of everyone in their organization.

Keeping Pace with Accelerating Change

Brin and Page also understood that the fundamental work of business leaders was being transformed by the sudden need to keep pace with the speed of accelerating change. The work of the business leader can be summed up in three words: strategy and execution. Whether business leaders succeed or fail depends on how well they perform these two fundamental management tasks. For over a century, strategy was accomplished by planning and the key to execution was effective control. Planning and control can be effective organizing principles when the world is relatively stable. They may not necessarily work best, but they usually work well enough when change is incremental.

However, when the pace of change accelerates, fixed plans and rigid controls are poor guides for navigating the turbulent waters of constantly shifting seas. Iterative adaptability and creative collaboration are better organizing principles in times of great change. In designing Google’s organization, Brin and Page shifted the fundamental dynamics of strategy and execution from “Plan and Control” to “Iterate and Co-create.” As a consequence, their new organization became more of a peer-to-peer network than a top-down hierarchy. With practices such as a 60-to-1 ratio of managers to workers and its well-publicized 20% rule—employees spend twenty percent of their time on self-managed projects—Google’s organizational system naturally reinforces iteration and co-creation.

Building Networks, Not Hierarchies

When organizations are designed as networks, advocating for respect and empowerment is unnecessary because, in networks, respect is earned rather than ascribed, and power comes from being connected rather than from being in charge. One of the problems with the notion of empowerment is that it assumes that hierarchies are a given. The voluntary delegation of power from a person in authority to his or her subordinates is something that can only happen in a hierarchy. In networks where power stems from one’s initiative to make connections, the notion that one has the capacity to ascribe power from one person to another is irrelevant.

Respect and empowerment are not the enablers of great cultures; they are the natural byproducts of a great management system. The true enablers of great cultures are the two dynamics that define the peer-to-peer network: iterate and co-create. As the leaders at GM and the VA seek to turnaround their troubled organizations and as the members of the Great Cultures Initiative pursue their noble cause, they might all benefit from the management wisdom of the engineers who learned that when you want most of the people to engage in the right behavior most of the time, you build a network, not a hierarchy.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

Does Going “Bossless” Create an Accountability Vacuum?

By Rod Collins

 

In December 2013, Zappos created quite a buzz in the business community when they announced that, by the end of 2014, they would go “bossless” and adopt an egalitarian organizational model called holacracy. In their new organization, there will be no titles, no managers, and no hierarchy. Instead their organization will be transformed into a network of approximately 400 self-managed teams where people can assume various roles based upon the changing needs of their particular projects.

While Zappos is not the first company to go bossless—W. L. Gore and Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex, has been bossless since it inception in 1958—it’s the first company to draw broad attention to an alternative management model that, while highly successful, has nevertheless remained hidden in plain sight for literally decades.

In a recent article in the Gallup Business Journal, Elizabeth Kampf questions the wisdom of Zappos’ decision by speculating that employee engagement—which correlates highly with positive business outcomes—is likely to suffer in the absence of traditional managers. Kampf’s doubts about holacracy are based upon Gallup’s extensive body of research, which identifies managers as the essential variable in employee engagement. Kampf postulates that the elimination of managers at Zappos could lead to an accountability vacuum that would be detrimental to employee engagement, and in turn, future business outcomes. Kampf suggests that, rather than eliminating their managers, Zappos’ best move might be to replace bad managers with great ones.

Kampf’s suggestion, however, might be shortsighted because, while Gallup’s research is indeed extensive, it may nevertheless be limited. By her own admission, Kampf acknowledges that Gallup hasn’t studied the holacracy model. In all likelihood, Gallup’s research presents a picture of what works and what doesn’t work in the typical hierarchical organization. Because hierarchies, by design, are populated by an array of supervisors—all of whom have the positional authority to kill good ideas and keep bad ideas alive—it is not surprising that Gallup recently reported only 30 percent of U.S. workers and 13 percent of workers worldwide are engaged at work. It’s clear that traditional organizations have an engagement problem.

Kampf also notes that Gallup’s research shows that great managers are rare. In other words, in the typical organization, great managers are the exception rather than the rule. This brings to mind the saying attributed to W. Edwards Deming that when most of the people engage in the wrong behavior most of the time, the problem is the system not the people. Perhaps great managers are people who have learned how to work around a bad system. If that’s the case, great managers will always remain rare, and suggesting to companies that the pathway to better managers is to recruit from this very limited pool doesn’t alleviate the larger employee engagement problem. If the prevalent management system consistently spawns bad managers, perhaps a better solution is a better system.

Kampf incorrectly states that, with more than 3,000 employees, Zappos is the largest company yet to embrace going bossless and implies that the online shoe retailer may be moving into uncharted territory. However, W. L. Gore and Associates, which today has over 10,000 employees in 30 countries around the world, has been a very successful self-managed company for over 56 years. Gore has made a profit in every year of its existence and is a permanent fixture on Fortune’s list of the “Best Companies To Work For.” Employee engagement is not a problem at Gore. Nor is there an accountability vacuum.

When Bill Gore decided in 1958 that he would build a company without managers, he knew it could only work if people were directly accountable for the company’s results. This meant that people had to have an incentive to do more rather than less work and the right work rather than the wrong work. His solution was to hold people accountable to their peers by creating a performance system where people evaluated and were evaluated by 20 colleagues. Based on Gore’s longstanding record of success, one could argue that accountability to many peers is more effective than accountability to single supervisors.

Zappos isn’t embracing holacracy because they have bad managers or an employee engagement problem. At number 38 on Fortune’s “Best Company To Work For” list, it’s clear that employee engagement is not an issue. Zappos is adopting holacracy as a natural part of its evolution. Since its founding, it has actively spurned traditional management practices and has placed a high value on building the outstanding culture for which it is well-known. Zappos is going bossless because it understands that if you want most of the people to engage in the right behavior most of the time, you build and continually improve a great system. 

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).