Rod Collins's Blog, page 17

Change Management for DAM

By John Horodyski

 

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.” — C.S. Lewis

The month of May brings with it great evidence of change. Spring’s effects finally can be seen in the colorful blooms in our gardens. Everything smells better with the newfound flora. Everything feels better with the welcome change to warmer weather. And the students graduating from colleges and universities enter a world filled with new change and opportunity. Change is everywhere and we are unable to stop it. We must change, we allow it, we embrace it and let it happen.

Another great reminder of change was evident in the annual Henry Stewart DAM New York conference that took place on April 30 – May 2. For three days, DAM (Digital Asset Management) practitioners, professionals and vendors came together to share their wisdom, engage in vigorous debate and exhibit the latest and greatest that DAM has to provide.

With such a gathering of intellect and passion, there are always key talking points that resonate with the crowd and rise to the top of conversations. DAM issues such as metadata and rights management were there to be heard and argued by the crowd. The issue of “change” and in particular “change management” was there in force, receiving greater buzz than in previous years. Besides those who were seeking to change their old DAM to a new DAM, and others debating the conundrum of whether or not to upgrade, the idea of “change management” resonated for many for a much more holistic and enterprise point of view. Change was (and is) a topic of a much bigger degree and scale.

 

Change is Everywhere

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” — Albert Einstein

Technological innovation results in a constantly evolving business environment. Social media is a great example of how technology and communication has created change in our work. Human beings possess an innate desire to interact and socialize. Over the past few decades, new communication technologies — such as email, the Internet and mobile devices — have become widely adopted. These tools allow us to communicate faster, more frequently and to a larger audience than previously possible.

Social media represents the latest evolution of communication technology and employees may have a variety of social media technology tools at their disposal. Executives are watching to determine whether corporate social media technology use is merely a passing fad or a process and business technology that will ultimately improve the bottom-line or extend reach.

In another example of present-day change, the “semantic web” allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries. This evolution of the web is changing the existing flow of information within the modern business organization transforming it into a place where, “learning with and from others encourages knowledge transfer and connects people in a way consistent with how we naturally interact.” This evolution of the modern business organization may be seen as a fulfillment of the definition of the semantic web as a conduit in data sharing thus transforming business. DAM is central to this change.

Information and all its data and digital assets has 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 watch and scrutiny from our content creators, users and stakeholders alike. Our organizations need to change as well and not only be prepared for the change, but respond well and be comfortable with our solutions.

 

Change Management

“I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.” — George Carlin

Change management is an approach to transitioning or changing people, groups of people, processes and technology to a desired, future state within an organization. The concept and practice of change management was born in the consulting world in the 1980s driven by the need to understand performance and adoption techniques to allow for greater innovation and organizational adoption methods. One of the premier researchers and thought leaders on change management, Dr. John Kotter, reminds us all that

“70 percent of all major change efforts in an organization fail … because organizations often do not take the holistic approach required to see the change through. ”

Change management is a structured approach to ensure changes are made in order to achieve some form of long-term benefits. DAM is all about change: changing the way we understand what is an asset, digital and physical, in our organizations and how its value may be transcended throughout all layers of the organization. With such change, the contemporary business organization is motivated by exterior factors (e.g., competition and innovation) to adapt quicker than their competitors to avoid getting left behind.

 

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

Surge in Inaugural Exchange Enrollment Sets the Stage for 2015

by Sneha Chiliveru

Despite its much publicized rocky start, enrollment in health plans through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) insurance exchanges surpassed 8 million enrollees in its inaugural open enrollment period, beating initial budget forecasters’ projections by more than one million subscribers.

After accounting for potential nonpayment of premiums, roughly half of the states met or exceeded enrollment expectations after the surge in enrollment during March and early April. Florida, California, Texas, and Idaho led the pack with the highest percentage of enrollments compared to expectations.

Participation in the exchanges increased from 61 percent of projected enrollment, as of March 1, 2014, to 115 percent by April 19, 2014. Marketplaces have enrolled 24 percent of projected 2016 enrollment and 13 percent of their target populations. In addition, both State Based Exchanges (SBMs) and Federally Facilitated Marketplaces (FFMs) have also exceeded Marketplace projections by 121 percent and 113 percent, respectively. However, within these categories, projections vary widely among states, with some states already exceeding projected 2014 enrollment figures, and others enrolling less than 25 percent of their projections.

As the data indicate, enrollment numbers for the exchanges have significantly passed projected targets. If these initial trends are harbingers of the exchanges growth potential, states can expect to see substantial enrollment increases in the coming years.

These data trends are anticipated to be even more favorable once final numbers are released with updated paid member rates.  This is an exciting time for the healthcare industry as it looks forward to the 2015 enrollment kickoff.  If premium rates hold or increase minimally, as analysts forecast, we can expect even greater gains in enrollment as enthusiastic early adopters spread the word about the value provided them by the new exchanges.

 

Sneha Chiliveru is an Associate at Optimity Advisors.

Why Companies Struggle With Innovation and Collaboration

by Rod Collins

 

In a recent survey of over 1,700 CEOs, IBM reported the need to innovate and collaborate as uppermost on the minds of business leaders in both the public and the private sectors. Three out of every four CEOs in the study identified collaboration as the most important trait that they are seeking in their employees, and, in the face of an increasingly complex world brought about by the sudden emergence of the technology revolution, many chief executives realize that they need to make significant changes if their organizations are to respond to market pressures to innovate. In short, the business survival strategy for a market landscape where technology now tops the list of external forces impacting organizations is a simple mantra: “Innovate and collaborate.”

However, what is simple is not necessarily easy. While chief executives recognize they need to dramatically improve their capacities for both innovation and collaboration, it appears that few of them know what to do to accelerate their performance in these two critical strategic competencies. This may explain why, in his analysis of a recent study by economists Robert Litan and Ian Hathaway, Richard Florida notes that a reduction in business dynamism has led to the troubling condition where “business deaths now exceed births.” Perhaps the reason developing an effective capacity for innovation and collaboration is so hard is that many, if not most, business leaders are unaware of the defining elements of these two competencies.

When people think of innovation, they usually think of inventions, such as the Apple iPhone, Google glasses, or Wikipedia. While these products are indeed the outcomes of innovation, they are not the essential ingredients that make these companies masters of managing change. Often, when business leaders decide innovation is an important strategic initiative, their first move is to set up a department, put somebody in charge, and hold that person accountable for coming up with ideas for innovative products. Unfortunately, these initiatives rarely produce real results. Innovation is not a department. It is a way of thinking and acting that alters the fundamental DNA of a business and its management so that creativity—which Steve Jobs defined as the simple act of connecting things—becomes the core fabric of the enterprise.

The essential element of innovation is serendipity, which is the capacity to make unusual connections. These connections are the incubators for innovative product ideas. Serendipity is something that is more likely to happen when people from various disciplines exchange ideas than from isolated activity inside a bureaucratic department. People working in silos “doing their part” are far less likely to come up with the idea of combining your telephone and your music collection into one device than a collection of workers from multiple perspectives. That’s why, for example, Google provides free meals for its workers. While many laud the company for its progressive approach to employee perks, the real reason for Google’s free food is to enable opportunities for serendipitous encounters.

When we think of collaboration, what usually comes to mind is a picture of a highly cooperative and coordinated group who really enjoy working together. We tend to think that group collaboration is a primarily a reflection of individual willingness on the part of different people to support each other. With this understanding, many leaders feel the key to improving collaboration is to train individuals to be more cooperative and are surprised when their training investment yields far less than expected. While cooperation and coordination are indeed important elements of collaboration, neither is the essential element.  Jane McGonigal, in her insightful book Reality is Broken, defines collaboration as the intersection of three kinds of efforts: cooperation, coordination, and co-creation. Of the three the most important element is co-creation because when workers have the opportunity to co-create what they do, cooperation and coordination are likely to follow. The simple reality is without co-creation, collaboration is not possible.

The reason why, despite their best intentions, so many companies struggle with innovation and collaboration is that their organizations are usually top-down hierarchies, and thus, are not designed to cultivate these two competencies. In fact, they are designed to unwittingly squash both innovation and collaboration. The defining attribute of the top-down hierarchy is the chain of command, which means, in every traditionally organized company, there is an army of supervisors who tend to be heavily invested in the status quo and have the positional authority to kill good ideas and keep bad ideas alive. Serendipity doesn’t stand a chance against this army because new ideas tend to threaten the status quo. And when the fundamental organizational dynamic is “to do what you’re told” inside fragmented silos, hierarchical bureaucracies are not places where co-creation is even remotely possible.

If CEOs are serious about improving their companies’ capacity for innovation and collaboration, they need to transform their organizations from top-down hierarchies to peer-to peer-networks and model themselves after companies, such as Google, Amazon, Whole Foods, Morning Star, and Zappos. The leaders of these companies understand that, if you want your organization to be highly competent at innovation and collaboration, you design your organization for serendipity and co-creation. That’s why they build peer-to peer networks rather than top-down hierarchies.

 

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). 

Spring Cleaning – Your Records Management Checklist

By Gretchen Nadasky

 

When you make something, cleaning it out of structural debris is one of the most vital things you do.  – Christopher Alexander, architect and design theorist

This is the time of year when lifestyle gurus publish their tips and techniques for cleaning the house, putting away last year’s tax return documents and organizing the gear in the garage for summer fun.  At Optimity Advisors, we are busy helping clients spruce up the corporate house with Information Management.  Here are some questions to see if it’s time for your company to do some spring cleaning.

It’s 2014, do you know where your risk is? – The first few years of this century may someday be thought of as the Era of E-Discovery.  Huge lawsuits from competitors and whistle-blowers have been won and lost with the smoking gun of a careless e-mail or leaked e-document.  But did you know that the bigger risk might be lurking in off-site storage?  Since physical documents are more costly to access, a new strategy of plaintiffs is to demand large swaths of physical documents in digital form.  Companies that don’t know the location and contents of boxes in off-site storage waste millions of dollars on law associates to cull boxes and scan (mostly irrelevant) documents. The process is risky, expensive and adds no enterprise value. Has your company developed and maintained a retention and destruction schedule to minimize this risk?  Are the officers of your company aware of the nature of the archived documents so they can make educated risk assessments about that information?

Is there a place for everything… and everything in its place? – Pop quiz: In your company, where are the corporate records located?  Today, the answer for most companies is “everywhere.” Workers, managers and corporate officers are now expected to create documents wherever they are.  In response to that pressure and others they also store them wherever it is convenient.  In addition, third party vendors may be holding important corporate information that only they can access.  Cloud solutions can help rein in the digital diaspora but only if the documents can be located in the first place.  Lastly, if there is no place to store records employees are more likely to keep multiple copies for convenience, increasing overall storage costs.  Does your company know where its records are being held?  Is there a policy in place to help employees avoid common pitfalls like storing vital records on their hard drive?  Do agreements with third party vendors include provisions for the return of your own information?

Plan to go abroad this year? -  With the international news cycle full of stories about security breeches of individuals and companies in the United States, European and Asian companies are becoming hesitant to expose their own citizen’s information in the US.  Safe Harbor talks are heating up the backchannels of diplomacy and are likely to result in stiffer international rules. Is your company thinking about expanding or hiring abroad?  What systems and procedures are in place to protect electronic Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from hacking or misuse?  A good spring cleaning program would include an assessment of PII in everyday workflows to ease the flow of international trade.

What would the CEO do? – Launching a corporate-wide spring cleaning initiative will take a directive or guidance from the top.  Most employees want to be good information stewards. Clear direction from the top will give employees permission to take time from their day-to-day role to manage their own information.  With the amount of content being generated everyday, it takes a little effort from the entire company to make sure that information is properly handled, but the key to success is clear and concise directives. Does your company have an executive mandate for information governance?

Do you fight for your rights – or even know what they are? – At most companies content creation in king.  Business moves at lightening speed and often the priority is to get the next campaign on-line or content out for the e-commerce site.  In the haste to make something new the rights and permissions for images or talent can get separated.  A good digital asset management system can keep the records together with the assets and allow for re-use that saves time and money later.  Is there a place in your company to store rights information for the expensive content that is purchased? Do users know where to find internally created content so they don’t have to keep re-inventing the wheel?

Optimity Advisors can help to start with one initiative to get your company moving on the path toward controlling digital and physical information and protect important corporate records. Once people see the success of the project they will have ideas of their own to increase efficiency, lower costs and decrease risk.  Happy spring cleaning!

 

Gretchen Nadasky @GNadasky is a Senior Associate at Optimity Advisors.

Innovative Leaders Think Outside-In, Not Inside-Out

by Rod Collins

 

Traditional business leaders often assume that everything that is needed to be successful out in the marketplace is contained inside their organizations. As a consequence, these managers tend to think inside-out and view the outside world more as a conceptual market than as a collection of human customers.

Inside-out thinking reinforces the notion that bosses are more important than customers. This explains why traditional corporate cultures seem to be more interested in pleasing bosses than delighting customers. In the inside-out organization, the focus of business is on the transaction. As a result, we sometimes find that traditional managers don’t attach any real value to their customers because consumers are viewed merely as market mechanisms for the transaction of products into profits.

Innovative leaders, on the other hand, think outside-in. That’s because they put the customer at the center of everything they do. They understand that, if they want to truly know what’s most important to customers, they will never have everything they need to succeed within their walls. Outside-in organizations understand that managing in a rapidly changing world means that managers cannot rely solely on the knowledge of their inside experts. They assume that market reality is subject to accelerating change and that management’s first job is to continually align its strategies and its products with what’s most important to customers. In the outside-in organization, the focus of business is on the customer experience. Thus, if customer values are at odds with management policy, the first step of managers who think outside-in is usually to reconsider the value of the policy.

LEGO is a company that is thriving today because more than a decade ago, its people learned the value of thinking outside-in when they responded in an unusual way to a security breach. In the late 1990s, four weeks after the release of the first version of LEGO’s Mindstorms kits, a student hacker cracked the software code for the new product and created a better version. Rather than defensively protecting its copyright and beefing up its security, LEGO realized that the hacker meant no harm. In fact, the student was a loyal LEGO enthusiast who was only interested in making the product better. So, LEGO’s managers decided to think differently by choosing to embrace rather than to fight the hacker and reaching out to all LEGO enthusiasts to invite them to co-create the next generation of Mindstorms kits.

Today, LEGO supplements its 120 paid designers with 100,000 loyal enthusiasts. Thinking outside-in has literally brought the company free resources. There’s no better way to understand what’s most important to customers than by inviting them to become voluntary co-creators, especially when they care about your products.

 

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).

Make DAM Your Single Source of Truth

By John Horodyski

 

A wise educator once proclaimed that there is “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Not only is this true today, but it’s an absolute necessity where rich media assets compete for attention and use within a multichannel distribution framework. Assets are located, changed into different formats and delivered to television, mobile, print and social media with various degrees of accompanying metadata. To speed the process there needs to be a place — and specifically a central place — where all rich media assets may be managed for specific use and distribution. A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system can be that place: the Place of Everything (PoE).

A variety of clever acronyms have been word-smithed for our collective enjoyment over the last couple of years. In particular, Cisco defines the Internet of Everything (IoE) as, “bringing together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable.” We were also introduced to the Internet of Things (IoT) — uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure.

DAM and its placement within the content industries and solutions can be seen as combining these definitions to be a valued structure within an organization — a “place of everything.” This article argues that in order to exact this PoE, a great deal of consideration needs to be paid to the foundational structures of the DAM to ensure that it is intentional, grounded in good design, always striving to adhere to the business requirements at hand and provides an organized solution for its users.

What is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

As a refresher, DAM consists of the management of tasks and technological functionality designed to enhance the inventory, control and distribution of digital assets (rich media such as photographs, videos, graphics, logos, marketing collateral). DAM enables the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets for use and reuse in marketing and business operations. A digital asset is any form of content or media that has been formatted into a binary source and includes the right to use it.

And by design, DAM is intentional and purposeful. The practice of managing digital assets achieves operational control of your organization’s information and intellectual property and leverages their growth potential. DAM may also enhance other mission-critical systems such as e-commerce and online shopping experiences. DAM must be grounded in strategy and supported by business decisions driving the program. DAM as the PoE serves as the single source of truth for all assets within an organization.

DAM Considerations

 It’s commonly known but worth repeating: technology should never lead the decision making process for DAM demands — the business sets the foundation for strategy first. Technology is incredibly important and the vendor review and selection process is a critical step, but that step must follow the business requirements and digital strategy.

Deciding to implement a DAM system is a step in the right direction to gaining operational and intellectual control of your digital assets, and it is a decision 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.

Foundation for DAM

 Every strategy needs to start with a foundation, a solid base upon which some form of structure rests and where meaning may be established. Intention starts when you build the business case for DAM and the foundations soon follow. A successful DAM strategy uses key foundational structures to ensure that everything can get into its place:

Foundation #1 — Assets
Foundation #2 — Metadata
Foundation #3 — Taxonomy
Foundation #4 — Workflow
Foundation #5 — Digital Rights Management
Foundation #6 — Work in Progress / Digital Preservation
Foundation #7 — Governance

Great content isn’t really great until it gets found, consumed and shared. We can thank metadata for most of that organization, but there needs to be a central initiative to create and support that single source of truth. The opportunity for content owners, marketing technologists and all those managing content lies in understanding the value metadata provides their assets, and how it can empower their digital operations from creation, to discovery, through distribution.

 

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

Turning Followers Into Leaders

by Rod Collins

 

The most unlikely place where you might expect a radical reinvention of management is the U.S. Navy. After all, command-and-control is synonymous with the military. As in most organizations, rank divides people into unequal strata where those with higher rank are the leaders and those at the bottom of the chain-of-command are the followers. The dynamics of top-down structures are very clear: The leaders give the orders and the followers do what they’re told. In traditional organizations, compliance is the ultimate virtue. One former submarine captain, however, doesn’t agree. He believes there’s a better way to run a ship, and he has the experience to back up the belief.

In his book, Turn the Ship Around!, L. David Marquet tells an engaging story of how he used a radically different management model to transform his crew’s submarine from worst to first. When he took command of the Santa Fe in early 1999, the ship had the unenviable reputation of being the joke of the Navy. No one wanted to be on this ship because it could kill careers, which may explain why the Santa Fe had the worst retention rate and one of the lowest promotion rates in the submarine force.

One advantage to being asked to turnaround a deteriorating situation is that the leader often has a lot of latitude as long as the job gets done. Marquet took advantage of this latitude and used it as an opportunity to consider a radically different way to lead a submarine. He would disregard the ultimate virtue of compliance—the fuel of what he calls the “leader-follower” model—and instead embrace the value of collaboration as the organizing principle for his new assignment. He would turn the ship around by displacing the “leader-follower” model and employing a “leader-leader” model. In other words, on his new ship, everyone would learn how to lead together.

Implementing leader-to-leader meant changing the fundamental dynamics of the ship’s operating system. It meant people needed to take the initiative rather than wait for instructions, focus on what needed to be done over blindly following procedures, communicate frequently when dealing with the unexpected, and—a truly radical idea—questioning the ranking member when he or she was wrong. In short, the crew would need to behave very differently if they were going to leverage the power of collaboration.

In considering the strategy for how he would implement the leader-to-leader model, Marquet knew he had to change both the thinking and the acting of the ship’s crew. His challenge was deciding which to change first. Often, when implementing culture changes, leaders mandate everyone to participate in training programs where people are instructed in new ways of thinking. This theory assumes people are highly rational and that new ways of thinking will inevitably lead to new ways of acting. Unfortunately, people aren’t always rational and often resist mandatory training by being present in body only and leaving the programs with their old thinking firmly intact. Recognizing this, Marquet decided on a different approach. Instead of trying to change the crew’s thinking as a pathway to new action, he would change the operating system and require people to act differently, hoping that the new thinking would follow. Whether or not changed thinking actually resulted was less of a concern to the captain. Marquet understood that, when it comes to culture change, what matters most is that people act differently.

In changing the ship’s operating system, he introduced innovative practices and mechanisms that were designed to improve the ship’s overall state of control by delegating control and decision-making authority to those actually doing the work. One such practice was a discipline Marquet calls “deliberate action,” where the crew would state what they intended to do before they would do it. So, for example, an officer on the bridge might announce, “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship,” to which the captain would usually respond, “Very Well.” However, if a member of the crew noticed something was amiss, he was encouraged to share his observation so the crew could process the information as a team before the action was taken.

To illustrate the power of deliberate action, Marquet relates the story of how, while participating in a drill, he unknowingly became confused about the ship’s direction and instructed the ship to make what would have been an incorrect maneuver. The benefits of the leader-to-leader operating system became apparent when, the ship’s quartermaster simply stated, “No, Captain, you’re wrong.” The captain quickly recognized his error and averted a serious mistake because of the new ways of acting that he put in place. On how many ships is it safe to tell the captain he’s wrong? When collaboration rather than compliance is the guiding principle, the captain’s confusion never becomes a ship error.

Marquet’s experiment in shared leadership was immensely successful because, as the Navy inspectors pointed out after assigning the Santa Fe the highest grade that anyone had seen, “Your guys tried to make the same number of mistakes as everyone else. But the mistakes never happened because of deliberate action. Either they were corrected by the operator himself or by a teammate.” As Marquet astutely observes, “Many people talk about teamwork but don’t develop mechanisms to actually implement it.” Deliberate action is a mechanism that transforms teamwork from wishful thinking to reliable action. It’s a valuable lesson for any organization that takes teamwork seriously.

 

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).

Revolutionizing the Way Power Works in Organizations

by Rod Collins

 

Whether an organization is effective or not is all about power. Effective organizations are powerful players with the wherewithal to shape the world when they can and to quickly adapt when they can’t. Ineffective organizations are those that are powerless in the face of difficult or challenging circumstances.  If you want to be the leader of an effective organization, you need to be highly skillful in the use of power.

Unfortunately, power generally has a bad reputation. While social scientists define power, achievement, and affiliation as the three fundamental orientations in human social relationships, most of us are much more comfortable with calling ourselves achievement-oriented or affiliation-oriented than we are with owning up to being power-oriented. If someone strives to be successful at an art or a craft, we think of her as wanting to be accomplished. If a person is good at making friends, we call him popular. But if people are driven by a need to be continually in charge of things, we often describe them as power hungry. Most of us tend to think of power in a negative light. That’s because most of our experiences with power are inside hierarchical organizations where power is equated with control.

The notion of power is actually neutral; it is neither good nor bad. Whether we experience power as positive or negative often reflects the quality of our relationships. That’s because power is always interpersonal and only exists within the context of relationships. In hierarchical organizations, power is generally ascribed by position, with those few in higher positions having more authority than the many in the lower ranks. Thus, most of us perceive the exercise of authority as about being in charge and having power over people.

The technology revolution, however, is radically reshaping the way power works, especially in large organizations. The late psychologist Abraham Maslow observed that the most effective leaders invest in power with rather than power over people. Our early experiences with online collaborations are demonstrating that Maslow’s observation holds true for organizations as well. Wikipedia, Craigslist, Linux, eBay, and Google are not interested in exerting control or having power over people. These 21st century businesses understand that, in today’s fast-paced world, the best companies are those who build platforms to share power with people. By building networked structures to aggregate and leverage the collective intelligence of the many, these mass collaboration enterprises are able to redefine whole industries and easily outperform their traditional counterparts.

The leaders of these innovative enterprises understand that power with people is much more effective than power over people, especially when organizations have to manage at speed of change to remain competitive in a hyper-connected world. They also understand that, in a post-digital world, the basis for power for effective leadership is rapidly shifting from “being in charge” to “being connected.” Executive power no longer comes from dominating the thinking or directing the work of others; it now comes from integrating the best of everyone’s ideas and leveraging platforms of mass collaboration. In contrast to traditional hierarchies, which limit the interpersonal influence of the many through the ascription of authority, the power structures of digital age companies amplify the opportunities for the development of relationships across all the people within an organizational network. The more connections there are, the quicker a business can access and leverage its collective intelligence.

In our hyper-connected world, power does not come from amassing control, but rather from co-creating a shared understanding. When co-creation rather than control is the fundamental way things get done, being in charge is meaningless because an effective shared understanding can never be mandated. Shared understanding is something that has to be facilitated and created by consensus.

The most significant leadership challenge for today’s corps of business leaders is making the shift in the way they approach power. If they continue to insist that power is a function of being in charge, they are likely to fall victims to the consequences of a world that is changing much faster than their organizations. If they can accept that power in a hyper-connected world is a function of being connected, both they and their organizations will become highly skilled in the exercise of power in a rapidly changing world. That’s because when you have the capacity to leverage your organization’s collective intelligence, nobody is smarter or faster than everybody.

 

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). 

Leadership in Peer-to-Peer Networks

by Rod Collins

 

Traditional leadership models and their longstanding ways of thinking and acting are no longer relevant in a world that has been suddenly transformed by the digital revolution. Game-changing developments in technology have given rise to a radical new organizational model—the peer-to-peer network—that is steadily and irrevocably redefining the way that work gets done in organizations. That’s the key message in a new book by Mila Baker, Peer-to-Peer Leadership: Why the Network is the Leader. 

Baker makes a convincing argument for why informal networks have suddenly become as powerful, and in many instances, more powerful than traditional hierarchies. The traditional organizational paradigm assumes that organizations work best when they are designed as machines. Perhaps that may explain why the typical organization chart resembles a mechanical schematic. As the dominant metaphor for the Industrial Age, the machine defined the context for how the world worked for well over two centuries. One of the consequences of the pervasiveness of this metaphor is a strong belief that effective organizations need strong centralized leaders who carefully manage information and set clear directions for workers to follow. 

Over the past two decades the dominance of mechanical thinking has been progressively chipped away by a seemingly unlikely group: IT engineers. During this time, the information technology experts have created an unprecedented and pervasive architecture that has transformed the ways we process information, which we best know as the Internet. The Internet is a highly decentralized structure that is radically disrupting the ways people communicate information. Instead of a top-down broadcast structure that requires a static chain of command within the context of clear “need to know” boundaries, the dynamic nodal structure of the Internet provides everyone with open and direct access to everyone else based on a concept Baker refers to as “equipotency.” 

Equipotency is a defining principle of networks that considers all nodes within a node community as being equally privileged. Thus, while hierarchies concentrate information and decision-making in the hands of a few powerful and privileged leaders, in equipotent models, “the network itself becomes the leader as it constantly computes raw data and turns it into actionable information.” This type of shared leadership is the dynamic that drives well-known crowdsourced enterprises, such as Wikipedia and Linux. 

When power is equally distributed, the need for empowerment and building coalitions become unnecessary. Equipotency results in a natural sharing of power for the simple reason that that’s how networks work. Empowerment—the voluntary distribution of power from those in authority to those doing the work—is something that can only happen in hierarchies. Empowerment as a sustainable managerial practice is highly unreliable because it can easily be erased on the whim of a single supervisor. Equipotency, however, is permanent because it is built into the fundamental fabric of the system. Thus, for example, at W.L. Gore and Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex,  because there are no bosses, no one has the authority to curtail anyone’s access to information or full participation.  Similarly, there’s no need to build coalitions because, in networks, “work is always accomplished through coalitions.” 

Effective leadership in the twenty-first century requires the acceptance of a new paradigm that sees the world as a network, not a machine. In networks, leadership is not the prerogative of a position but rather the shared responsibility of everyone involved in self-organized collaborations. As the technological revolution continues to expand the powerful advantages of peer-to-peer networks, it will become increasingly clear that technology has transformed the noble notion that nobody is smarter or faster than everybody into a highly practical force. After reading Baker’s book, you will fully understand why those who know how to lead in this context will have an enormous advantage over those who don’t.

 

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 Best Managers Know How to Navigate A Paradigm Shift

by Rod Collins

 

The term paradigm shift has been so overused that, for many of us, the phrase is nothing more than the latest jargon used by leaders whose actions rarely match their words. As tends to happen with jargon, the term has been so over-applied and misused that it has become trivialized. As a consequence, when a real paradigm shift happens, it often remains hidden in plain sight. This becomes particularly problematic for managers struggling to maintain business continuity because these transformational events invariably disrupt established business models. This was a painful lesson the managers in the newspaper industry learned when their failure to recognize that their businesses were in the grasp of a paradigm shift became an irrevocable competitive disadvantage.

In 1995, software engineer Craig Newmark created an e-mail distribution list to notify fellow software developers of social events in and around San Francisco. As a newcomer to the Bay Area, Newmark thought this list of fellow geeks might be a good way for him to quickly build a community of friends and contacts and escape the sense of isolation that often accompanies a move to a new town. While Newmark intended the list to be a vehicle to broadcast social gatherings, serendipity took the budding Internet community in a very different direction when the growing list of subscribers began using the mailing list for general advertising postings. In particular, people who were looking to fill jobs discovered that the list was a great way to connect with job seekers possessing the skills they needed. In early 1999, as the popularity of the powerful classified advertising tool began to explode, Newmark was able to quit his regular job and work full-time running a new company he called Craigslist. Over the next few years, what began as a tool for meeting people became the deadliest competitor the newspaper industry had ever encountered when one of the industry’s primary revenue sources rapidly evaporated. A new business model for classified advertising had emerged and had completely disrupted the conventional way of doing business. Because its managers failed to recognize the paradigm shift, the reign of the newspapers as the kings of classified advertising was gone forever.

When a paradigm shifts occur on a large social scale—as is the case today with the sudden and rapid emergence of the Digital Age—there is a period of time when both the fading and the emerging mindsets coexist. This coexistence is rarely smooth because large-scale paradigm shifts, by their nature, are highly disruptive. As a practical matter, this time of transition creates unique and unprecedented challenges for many managers because they find themselves caught between two worlds. On the one hand, because they work closely with younger workers who, as digital natives, are fully versed in digital technology and its new ways of thinking and acting, managers intuitively grasp—even though they may not fully understand—that the world is rapidly changing. On the other hand, these managers must continue to please a corps of senior executives who are essentially digital strangers and who remain fully invested in the old ways of Industrial Age thinking.

The successful managers in today’s transitioning times are those who know how to skillfully navigate between these two worlds. They are the digital immigrants who, like the younger digital natives, are very conversant in digital technology. However, unlike their younger colleagues, the new technology is not hard-wired into their natural thinking. Thus, rather than being second nature—as is the case with the digital natives—the digital immigrant’s relationship with the new technology is more like a second language. Because these managers are proficient in understanding the ways of thinking and acting in both the old and the new worlds, they have an important role to play in guiding their organizations through the unprecedented challenges that accompany a large-scale paradigm shift. As digital immigrants, they are uniquely positioned to transition their organizations from old to new ways of thinking by translating the realities of our new digital world into language that their senior leaders can understand and act upon. In our rapidly changing times, whether or not companies in other industries escape the fate of the companies in the newspaper industry will likely depend upon how adept their digital immigrant managers are at navigating their organizations through a very real paradigm shift.

 

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).