In the early 2000s Silicon Valley-based business guru John Hagel III was involved in a high-tech startup and hired Stephen Gillett, a young man right out of college. Less than a half-dozen years later, Gillett was named a senior vice president and chief information officer for Starbucks--the youngest CIO of a Fortune 500 company at that time.
And Hagel thinks he knows a primary reason for his one-time employee's meteoric rise. Everything that Gillett needed to know, Hagel said, he learned while becoming a guild leader in the popular online game World of Warcraft.
The co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte LLP, Hagel told the annual Wharton Leadership Conference that Gillett--just like other top players on the massive online multi-player game, with an estimated 8 million participants--reached out independently to build a large team of allies that solved complex problems and developed winning strategies.
Guild leaders in World of Warcraft "require a high degree of influence," noted Hagel, a successful author and longtime consultant. "You have to be able to influence and persuade people--not order them to do things. Ordering people in most of these guilds doesn't get you far."
The look inside World of Warcraft and its relevance for today's complicated business environment was part of a recent research project and book by Hagel and two co-authors--John Seely Brown and Lang Davison--that examines how companies re-invent and revive themselves by moving away from secretive, proprietary shops and toward a more open, collaborative business model. Their findings resulted in the recent publication of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.
The bottom line, they found, is that American companies will continue to fall behind their counterparts in emerging markets such as China or India unless they move toward what Hagel called "the edge," which is where passionate, change-driven employees collaborate with others on the kind of innovations that prevent a company from seeing its core business model slowly erode. "The only thing that succeeds," Hagel said, "is to take those initiatives on the edge and pull more and more of the core out to those edges--rather than trying to pull them back in." He asserted that chief executives who stick to the conventional wisdom and cling to secretive proprietary business systems are doomed to fail. Click here to read the full article.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Knowledge management strategies that create value
There is no one-size-fits-all way to effectively tap a firm's intellectual capital. To create value, companies must focus on how knowledge is used to build critical capabilities.
A firm that had invested millions of dollars in a state-of-the-art intranet intended to improve knowledge sharing got some bad news: Employees were using it most often to retrieve the daily menu from the company cafeteria. The system was barely used in day-to-day business activities.
Few executives would argue with the premise that knowledge management is critical—but few know precisely what to do about it. There are numerous examples of knowledge-management programs intended to improve innovation, responsiveness and adaptability that fall short of expectations. Researchers at the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change have been exploring the roots of the problem and have developed a method to help executives make effective knowledge management a reality in their organizations.
Knowledge management is still a relatively young field, with new concepts emerging constantly. Often, it is portrayed simplistically; discussions typically revolve around blanket principles that are intended to work across the organization. For example, companies are urged to emulate knowledge-management leaders such as British Petroleum and Skandia. And most knowledge-management initiatives have focused almost entirely on changes in tools and technologies, such as intranets and Lotus Notes.
These approaches have little relevance for executives contending with the day-to-day reality of running a company. Knowledge management is complex and multifaceted; it encompasses everything the organization does to make knowledge available to the business, such as embedding key information in systems and processes, applying incentives to motivate employees and forging alliances to infuse the business with new knowledge. Effective knowledge management requires a combination of many organizational elements—technology, human resource practices, organizational structure and culture—in order to ensure that the right knowledge is brought to bear at the right time.
Many companies have implemented sophisticated intranets, common repositories and other systems, largely ignoring the complex cultural issues that influence the way people behave around knowledge. By and large, those companies have seen little improvement in their ability to manage knowledge. Too often, companies implement state-of-the-art technology and then discover that culture and behavior are slow to change.
In short, simplistic solutions and "one-size-fits-all" approaches leave executives with little in the way of practical advice about how to transform the entire knowledge-management system. What's more, this fuzziness makes it difficult for executives to see a clear link between their knowledge-management investments and business value. Click here to read the full article.
A firm that had invested millions of dollars in a state-of-the-art intranet intended to improve knowledge sharing got some bad news: Employees were using it most often to retrieve the daily menu from the company cafeteria. The system was barely used in day-to-day business activities.
Few executives would argue with the premise that knowledge management is critical—but few know precisely what to do about it. There are numerous examples of knowledge-management programs intended to improve innovation, responsiveness and adaptability that fall short of expectations. Researchers at the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change have been exploring the roots of the problem and have developed a method to help executives make effective knowledge management a reality in their organizations.
Knowledge management is still a relatively young field, with new concepts emerging constantly. Often, it is portrayed simplistically; discussions typically revolve around blanket principles that are intended to work across the organization. For example, companies are urged to emulate knowledge-management leaders such as British Petroleum and Skandia. And most knowledge-management initiatives have focused almost entirely on changes in tools and technologies, such as intranets and Lotus Notes.
These approaches have little relevance for executives contending with the day-to-day reality of running a company. Knowledge management is complex and multifaceted; it encompasses everything the organization does to make knowledge available to the business, such as embedding key information in systems and processes, applying incentives to motivate employees and forging alliances to infuse the business with new knowledge. Effective knowledge management requires a combination of many organizational elements—technology, human resource practices, organizational structure and culture—in order to ensure that the right knowledge is brought to bear at the right time.
Many companies have implemented sophisticated intranets, common repositories and other systems, largely ignoring the complex cultural issues that influence the way people behave around knowledge. By and large, those companies have seen little improvement in their ability to manage knowledge. Too often, companies implement state-of-the-art technology and then discover that culture and behavior are slow to change.
In short, simplistic solutions and "one-size-fits-all" approaches leave executives with little in the way of practical advice about how to transform the entire knowledge-management system. What's more, this fuzziness makes it difficult for executives to see a clear link between their knowledge-management investments and business value. Click here to read the full article.
Do serious games work? See the results of 3 studies
"Military recruits and entry-level civilians of today not only understand technology in everyday use; they expect it," says Mark Oehlert, the Department of Defense's director of Game and Simulation department at the Defense Aquisition University.
These young workers are digital natives, raised in an environment where they were surrounded by inexpensive, yet highly interactive systems. Today's college generation grew up with video games from infancy. With games and technology at their fingertips, they process more information faster, and in a much different way, than most older people do.
See the study. Read the report. Click here.
These young workers are digital natives, raised in an environment where they were surrounded by inexpensive, yet highly interactive systems. Today's college generation grew up with video games from infancy. With games and technology at their fingertips, they process more information faster, and in a much different way, than most older people do.
See the study. Read the report. Click here.
Monday, July 19, 2010
A new strategy for employee engagement
The weakness of the economic recovery has real implications for the workforce -- and for HR executives charged with maximizing worker engagement and productivity. Do the typical initiatives to increase employee engagement work in this environment?
Aggressive head count reductions have interrupted talent strategies at many top companies. As smart employers strengthen the value proposition and focus on engagement (anything to increase engagement is a good thing), others are losing valuable contributors and dropping the ball on important training and staff-development programs.
There is a better way:
Beware the scourge of overwork. The average "job footprint" has increased by 1/3 in the recession, with the reward being frozen pay and shrinking perks. While so far workers have felt lucky to keep their jobs, workers who claim to be "disengaged" has doubled to 20% -- "engagement" as a vital source of innovation and creativity is evaporating.
Address emotional as well as economic needs. In The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations that Win, Dave and Wendy Ulrich focus on a notion of "abundance" and suggest a list of seven questions for leaders to ask:
Who am I?
Where am I going?
Whom do I travel with?
How do I build a positive work environment?
What challenges interest me?
How do I change, learn and grow?
What delights me?
While these questions seem unrelated to the bottom line, the answers can provide a powerful catalyst to engagement - and customer satisfaction and profitability.
Broad-based employment gains from entry-level positions to senior management are coming… are you ready?
Read the full story from HRE Online.
Aggressive head count reductions have interrupted talent strategies at many top companies. As smart employers strengthen the value proposition and focus on engagement (anything to increase engagement is a good thing), others are losing valuable contributors and dropping the ball on important training and staff-development programs.
There is a better way:
Beware the scourge of overwork. The average "job footprint" has increased by 1/3 in the recession, with the reward being frozen pay and shrinking perks. While so far workers have felt lucky to keep their jobs, workers who claim to be "disengaged" has doubled to 20% -- "engagement" as a vital source of innovation and creativity is evaporating.
Address emotional as well as economic needs. In The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations that Win, Dave and Wendy Ulrich focus on a notion of "abundance" and suggest a list of seven questions for leaders to ask:
Who am I?
Where am I going?
Whom do I travel with?
How do I build a positive work environment?
What challenges interest me?
How do I change, learn and grow?
What delights me?
While these questions seem unrelated to the bottom line, the answers can provide a powerful catalyst to engagement - and customer satisfaction and profitability.
Broad-based employment gains from entry-level positions to senior management are coming… are you ready?
Read the full story from HRE Online.
Human capital management predicts stock prices
Human capital management is fast emerging as an essential core competency (possibly the essential core competency) for organizations.
Firms that invest significantly in training and developing their employees generally outperform the market. Investment managers would be well-served to pay attention to broad measures of human capital management as a factor in portfolio selection. Engagement = Revenue.
With very few exceptions, an organization's greatest assets do indeed "walk out the door" at the end of each business day. For those who are eager to measure human capital more accurately, who then wish to create a much greater return on investments in human resources for their organization, The ROI of Human Capital is a must read on this subject. This book is an absolutely indispensable resource for helping to achieve these objectives.
For most human resource professionals, measurement remains a critical area of weakness. To allow their organizations to tap the full potential of human capital as a source of competitive advantage, HR strategists need to engage the emerging field of human capital analytics. This would make it possible for organizations to develop and execute human capital strategies that are grounded in actionable business intelligence - rather than relying on the old standbys (intuition, one-size-fits all benchmarking, or accepted measurement myths within the HR profession).
Only then will organizations truly reap the benefits of unleashing their employees’ full capabilities.
For more see the White Paper.
Firms that invest significantly in training and developing their employees generally outperform the market. Investment managers would be well-served to pay attention to broad measures of human capital management as a factor in portfolio selection. Engagement = Revenue.
With very few exceptions, an organization's greatest assets do indeed "walk out the door" at the end of each business day. For those who are eager to measure human capital more accurately, who then wish to create a much greater return on investments in human resources for their organization, The ROI of Human Capital is a must read on this subject. This book is an absolutely indispensable resource for helping to achieve these objectives.
For most human resource professionals, measurement remains a critical area of weakness. To allow their organizations to tap the full potential of human capital as a source of competitive advantage, HR strategists need to engage the emerging field of human capital analytics. This would make it possible for organizations to develop and execute human capital strategies that are grounded in actionable business intelligence - rather than relying on the old standbys (intuition, one-size-fits all benchmarking, or accepted measurement myths within the HR profession).
Only then will organizations truly reap the benefits of unleashing their employees’ full capabilities.
For more see the White Paper.
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