Have You Defined your Social Architecture?

The world of business discovered social media in 2009. Business professionals are setting up professional Facebook pages, groups and fan pages for themselves and their companies in a way they never did with LinkedIn, MySpace or Plaxo. Those with public profiles are Twittering, and all are experimenting to understand how these highly engaging methods work and the role they will play in a well-structured personal/professional communication program alongside the more traditional video conferences, phone calls, letters, emails, meetings, dinners, events, etc.

Each is a superb game-changing tool that promises to enable the business professional to maintain many more quality relationships than was ever previously possible. Overuse can cause distress among those who receive excessive or wrong communications, while leaving little time for work, especially as more and more tools become available.

A balance must be struck and an architecture must be adopted that identifies which of these social methods to use when, with what audience, with what frequency, in combination with which other methods, using which interface, etc.

Those who master this Social Architecture will enjoy great efficiencies of effort and outdistance their competitors.

Does Your Organization Eat its Young?

There is an expression used in corporate governance called “eating their young.” It defines the practice of hiring high-functioning candidates from the best schools into entry-level positions, working them hard for several years and then firing them when they become ready to move into managerial roles, offering promotions to weaker candidates instead.

Managers do this to have access to a strong pool of talented people to do their work, while reducing competition for their own jobs by promoting less capable employees.

This practice weakens your organization by reducing the quality of leadership and overall performance as the talented persons at the bottom are either let go or leave due to the frustration of being passed over for promotion. Employing consultants to fill the talent gap only exacerbates the problem.

Is this happening in your organization?

These practices are easily corrected.

Let’s talk

The Hidden (High) Cost of Corporate Announcements

Corporate announcements provide the market with the information needed to properly assess the corporation’s stock price.

Some of these announcements include information that may indicate a change in the organization itself, like a reorganization, merger, pursuit of a new strategy or technology, right-sizing, or investment in CRM or SAP.

These “Change Announcements” are sometimes issued with the intention of improving the stock price. Many receive lukewarm receptions from the market, and often no more than an “Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained” from an executive suite unaware of the costly shop-floor effect of Change Announcements, which can be large enough to offset even the benefits of announcements that do result in increases in stock price.

Change Announcements scare employees.

All employees become concerned for their jobs, even though announced changes often result in job changes for fewer than 5% of employees. This concern results in a significant drop in productivity, especially among knowledge workers, at the time workload increases as employees continue to do their old jobs while also helping to implement changes.

This shop-floor effect puts unnecessary pressure on successive levels of managers, creating a “crack-the-whip” effect – a minute announcement at the top, results in a small response among those with the most seniority at the next level and magnifies as the information works its way down the chain-of-command to the lowest-paid employees who are most vulnerable.

This loss in real productivity makes managers’ and employees’ jobs harder, and puts long-term downward pressure on stock price that outweighs the benefits of all but the most successful short-term increases.

There are several ways to resolve this.

Let’s talk.

Who is the Business Architect in your Organization?

Every organization has at least one Business Architect, though they are not often referred to as such.

The CEO often acts in the role of Business Architect when the issues facing the organization do not become too complex.

However, when the CEO is time-constrained and more complex issues arise that must be addressed, the person(s) to whom the CEO offloads the issues for deeper analysis is/are the organization's Business Architect(s).

Good Ideas Rarely Rise to the Top (In Your Company)

Many corporate Boards of Directors operate under the belief that "good ideas rise to the top." This is important because these Boards are directly responsible for the long-term health and growth of the company, to which good ideas contribute greatly.

This is a false belief. You will remember times throughout your career when people you know had very good ideas to which they could not get anyone to listen.

A good example occurred at Xerox, who invented the computer mouse and GUI in their PARC labs. Though they could not get senior management to listen, others did. Steve Jobs took a tour of the labs and went on to found Apple based on this technology. Bill Gates took the same tour and launched Windows soon afterward. Xerox received no benefits from these innovations; these good ideas did not rise to the top.

How to guard against this in your organization? Let's talk.