Our friend Danielle Brigida at the National Wildlife Federation just posted this Quarterly Update about their recent social media successes. Do you do this for your org? Great idea!
Humanize
Vineet Nayar is the CEO of HCL Technologies, a large company in India. He talks about trusting his younger employees, and really giving them responsibility. But here's the rub: he doesn't have a choice. Nearly half of India's population is under the age of 25.
"To discover the future,” influential strategy expert, Gary Hamel says, “it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.” By “unorthodox” Hamel refers to the ability to think and create outside the confines of existing categories, and the willingness to constantly re-examine and challenge long-standing legacies and sacred cows. Unless you can get your organization to challenge assumptions and think outside formulaic patterns and solutions, you cannot expect different results or steer it into a different future."
"have generational issues been superseded by social media and social business? I don't think so. I think generations are still a big challenge for organizations. So the question is, how do generational issues connect to social business? Here are some points to think about."
"The point is that value propositions are NOT about you but about your customers’ experience. The only thing that counts as value proposition is your customers’ perception of your value to them and the outcomes they experience. Your organization’s opinion or committee’s conclusions about your value do not count."
"I want to get this book out to people who don’t read management books in the first place. This is a management book for all the people like me, up until a few years ago, who had never read a Drucker or Senge, but still knew that something had gone terribly wrong in so many of our organisations, and had a gut instinct that things could be better we trusted our gut instincts."
Learning requires challenging your own assumptions, rather than just reacting to surface information. Learning, in fact, requires that we be more nuanced about data, because data rarely give you the answer. If they do, then the problem you were trying to solve was pretty simple. To be "actionable," it turns out, requires more than data. You need data, plus thinking, plus conversation, plus insight, plus some more data, plus some assumption-testing and a healthy dose of experimenting.
"Surprisingly enough, you can start the process of humanizing with performance reviews. It may sound odd--choosing that annoying process that many people hate in organizations as a place to start humanizing. But it turns out to be perfect. It's a nice little container for working on that discipline of clarity, and despite its history of mandatory annual meetings and somewhat coerced "development plans," it turns out to be a great opportunity to give up some control."
