Relevance of Enterprise 2.0 for HR
On this blog I have frequently given perspectives on implications of Enterprise 2.0 (E20), the use of social software in an enterprise context, for Human Resources. With this entry I want to summarize and update what I wrote earlier. I gave a general update on the value of social networks for HR in January 2008 including a presentation I held at our global HR Business Partner meeting. Tonight I will be presenting at an HR sharing event on the relevance of Enterprise 2.0 for HR. Find the slides posted to Slideshare.
The introduction of E20 requires a cultural shift in the enterprise to be effective. From the perception that knowledge is power to sharing knowledge, from know how to know who knows how, from hierarchy to community. Management needs to let go of control and expand employee autonomy as Gary Hamel states in the moon shots for management. The ultimate goal is to create social capital, a workforce that is interconnected to make collaboration thrive through relationships of trust. This really brings added value to the company in form of constant learning (the learning organization), change agility, speed, efficiency and scale. In this context new organization forms are emerging like communities of practice or agile forms of development, an environment that fosters innovation.
This is what Cisco CEO Chambers talks about in a presentation that Bertrand posted to his blog a year ago. Cisco has so called councils that work cross functionally and make far better decisions than hierarchical structures have generated in the past. Managers are measured against their success working across organizations. Speed and scale are key benefits.
HR is required as an enabler of E20, as change agent and organization designer. HR should be the engine behind company culture (Towers Perrin 2008). It is definitely the function influencing and creating a specific culture. It needs to put HR practices in place which support E20. For example employees need to be measured and compensated according to how successful they collaborate, the leadership brand needs to be redefined and Managers' mindset adapted! In my previous entry I have shown that HR's main responsibility is to build and implement the appropriate HR practices to support the creation of key critical organizational capabilities that bring competitive advantage to the business and that define an organization's culture.
Now how is E20 enabling HR? In order to show this it needs to be demonstrated how social software can be used for the implementation of HR practices. I just want to give a few examples, each for every HR practice category as defined by Ulrich. I already had an entry to this topic in 2007.
For the first which is people and everything related to their flow within the organization I want to point to the benefits of alumni networks providing the company with mature and seasoned talent, e.g. retirees for mentoring or consulting work, or the low cost ability to rehire former talent. My former entry on this here.
Looking at performance measurement social software provides high levels of visibility for employees. Experts are easily identified. Find an example how to measure “community equity” here.
In the area of work processes and environment clearly social software and communities make collaboration more efficient. Over the internet companies can also tap global collective intelligence or the “Wisdom of the Crowd” like Canadian company Goldcorp with the “Goldcorp Challenge” or Cisco with it's I-Prize.
For the information flow in a company, externally and internally the new tools are THE communication enablers. Nowadays CEOs write blogs, employees give their opinions in forums... Alone for this point I could probably write up an own entry but as there is so much out there on the topic I will stop here.
To see what Sun does in the E20 space have a look at this entry.
Posted at
06:19PM Feb 04, 2010
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Denison Model
Referring to an ealier entry about company culture I want to mention another approach of how to measure culture in the enterprise. This is the Denison Model propagated by Denison Consulting based on an organizational culture survey developed in year long research which ties survey results to bottom-line performance metrics through statistical analysis.
You find a lot of explanatory material on the Denison Home Page including an Introduction. Their model of organizational culture highlights four key traits (Mission, Consistency, Involvement, Adaptability) that an organization should master in order to be effective. Each trait breaks down into three more specific indices for a total of 12 indices and for each of these indices there are 5 survey questions. You can recognize all indices on the outer wheel of the circle model. The scores given for each are percentile scores that Denison generates by comparing an organization to the results of more than 1000 organizations with several hundred thousands of individual respondents all included in their normative database. The percentile scores indicate how well the organization ranks in comparison to the other organizations in the database.
Organizations represented in that database come from a wide variety of countries and industries. It was found that different industries and even different countries have very similar results to the global database. So Denison's conclusion is that the model translates effectively to different national cultures and environments. Denison also deploys their model as a Leadership Development Survey which consists of a self assessment and a 360 feed-back using the same traits as above.
In the context of Sun's acquisition of StorageTek in 2005 Sun went through the Denison survey with a comparatively small sample of respondents in a quick excercise to compare to results STK had generated in the past. The intent was to better understand each others cultures to help the integration of STK and ideally learn from each other. Maybe posting the results here can be of help for our colleagues at Oracle who are facing the challenge to integrate Sun now.
To be fair to Sun's scores, not only were they based on a small sample as mentioned but also 2005 was definitly not our best year. Shortly before Jonathan took over as CEO in April 2006 we were still very much struggling to reinvent ourselves in the aftermath of the dot.com burst.
Just as an example of interpretation: Sun received a percentile score of 12 in the Vision index of the Mission trait. This means that 12% of the organizations in the normative database scored lower than Sun. Vision and Strategic Direction & Intent were the main items that Jonathan fixed after getting into the job.
Clear strength was in the area of empowerment: employees could really step in and do things, authority was delegated so that people could act on their own combined with encouragement of risk taking and innovation which was the environment that made us an innovation leader in the industry.
It was a very intersting ride with Sun these past years but finally we couldn't turn it around successfully. I sincerely believe that we will get much stronger as combined entity with Oracle and there will be so much more opportunity!
Remains to give tribute to Sun Microsystems, founded in 1982, acquired by Oracle 2010. Visit the Tribute to Sun webpage!
Posted at
10:22PM Jan 27, 2010
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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HR Strategy
What I like about Ulrich is his high level very structured view on the HR function. I want to dedicate one more entry to his approach how to define HR deliverables.
Organizations should be more defined through their capabilities than through any sort of hierarchy. Managers are generally responsible for creating capabilities to respond to business challenges. They build a business strategy and HR supports the implementation of that strategy by putting in place appropriate HR practices which would build these capabilities. The capabilities become the culture that drives sustainable business success and are the measurable deliverables for HR. Many of them drive the intangible company value (taken from The Journey of HR, Excerpt from HR Competencies by Ulrich et al.).
As Ulrich points out in this video or more in depth together with Creelman in this article “only” 50% of a companies' stock price or market value is determined by earnings, the other 50% are the confidence in future earnings, you could also call “intangibles”. He lists 4 areas these intangibles consist of: doing what has been promised, having a solid strategy for growth in place and communicating it well to “the street”, having the core (technical) competencies on board and finally the right organizational capabilities to execute. So you could look at this as if HR is accountable for half of the intangibles, meaning overall 25% of the total company value. Clearly for building competencies and capabilities HR is the driver!
Technical competencies might be marketing's ability to manage it's distribution channels or manufacturing's ability to process excellence according to SixSigma. Capabilities are those things that make a company stand out in the minds of customers: a shared mind-set, like a company wide commitment to service, speed to market, leveraging learning of global teams, accountability for instant overnight product delivery or change resiliency while being in a very fast moving market.
The HR practices to build capabilities are put into 4 categories by Ulrich: People (everything dealing with the flow of people within an organization), Performance (ensuring accountability through managing performance from individuals and teams including compensation/benefits and rewards), Work (everything related to the work flow, how work in teams, administrative policies, design of physical facilities and space, how structure company to align with strategy; these practices directly influence talent) and 4. Information which I find particularly important as it looks like HR's role in communication gets more and more important nowadays. Internal communication can influence employee engagement, external communication builds the employer brand. Communication can even be seen like an element of success for all other HR practices being deployed.
Wayne Brockbank explains how the entire process of “Drafting a Powerful HR Strategy” is coming together in a video on the hrtransformationbook.com site under 4.2. He first defines what “strategic” means (sustainable, long term, adding substantial value...) and then leads us through 8 steps. The essence is that you need to define the key desired organizational and cultural capabilities needed to strengthen your key sources of competitive advantage which you have identified before. Important is to translate these into people behavior, what behavior from employees do we want to see in the future state, what will people be doing more of/less of. Based on this “vision” the appropriate HR practices will be identified and implemented and finally success will be measured.
Posted at
06:15PM Jan 22, 2010
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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HR Organization
Having Ulrich's book at hand I did go through Chapter 4 “Redesign the HR Department” to cross check if there are any groundbreaking new suggestions. Generally I believe there are not. He lists five key elements of the HR organization which are Service Centers, Corporate HR, Embedded HR, Centers of Expertise and Operational Executors.
Clearly the foundation are Service Centers and self-service technology to accomplish basic administrative processes. Cost savings implementing this type of service are in the range of 20-25%. Based on an average administrative cost per employee for large corporations of $1600 20% are more than 3 Mio$ per 10000 employees. Corporate HR is to align the function on business goals, work themselves directly on supporting the CEO's agenda and create a consistent company-wide culture and identity. Then comes HR which is embedded in the field, in the organization, regionally or in a line of business working with line management and leadership teams formerly known as Business Partners. They are served with the latest HR practices to support achievement of business goals by the Centers of Expertise (like Compensation, Staffing, Learning, etc.). These are hosting the HR Expertise, constantly creating new offerings aligned with the capabilities driving business strategy and are responsible for the HR learning community. The glue to make the whole system work are the Operational Executors. Ulrich concedes that many HR departments have attempted to operationalize this model but find that still some work cannot be accomplished. Therefor depending on how the organization is implemented HR Project Managers, HR Operations Managers, HR Consultants, HR Specialists/Advisers or however you would call them are needed internally to help execute properly.
Very important in setting up the HR organization though is to go through all the work being delivered and make the difference between strategic and transactional to then determine where in the organization it should go (in general 20-30% of the overall work would be strategic). The book has 4 case studies attached, in chapter 10 which is about Pfizer and their HR transformation this step is explicitly described.
Meanwhile at Sun we have been operating in such a model for the past 5 years and generally it has been working very well. The learnings we had at the beginning were mainly that you should not outsource too much at the same time. Mainly in a global context that can get very complex and lead to bad service quality. Secondly it turned out that having specific HR Business Partners who focus more on the organizational development type work in parallel to more operationally oriented HR people serving more or less the same client is not the best idea. Getting HR people to focus more on strategic, organizational development type work can better be achieved by providing them more support from Operational Executors. Also we could probably still do a better job in cross HR communication, learning and sharing. Although we have all the social networking and knowledge management technology on board we tend to work in HR silos, the Business Partners having their best practice forum but this is not integrated with e.g. the Centers of Expertise or the overall HR function. An intense exchange between Centers of Expertise and Embedded HR is definitely needed!
For multinational companies it is important from my perspective to implement an HR Organization that thinks global and acts local. At Sun we have a global HR country management organization and a line of business HR organization that goes down to regional level. The HR country manager has the challenge to coordinate all local line of business interests which in Europe is an extremely important role looking at the legal complexity of employee representative bodies.
Posted at
01:42PM Jan 10, 2010
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Upgrade HR Professionals
In Ulrich's HR Transformation this is the title of Chapter 6 and I will use it to summarize my former entries on the HR roles topic. The HR roles have not changed from what I posted in March 2007, Ulrich is still following the 4 core roles identified in HR Champions: Administrative Expert, Employee Champion, Change Agent, Strategic Partner. The HR activities have been discussed here. They are coaching, architecting, designing and delivering, facilitating.
The chapter is an excerpt of the Ulrich et al. Book “HR Competencies” from March 2008 which mainly goes through 6 competence domains: Credible Activist, Culture and Change Steward, Talent Manager and Organization Designer, Strategy Architect, Operational Executor and Business Ally. These have been findings of the Human Resource Competency Study by RBL Group and Ross School at the University of Michigan conducted 5 times over 20 years. Over 40000 HR people have been involved. A summary of the study, and the first chapter of the book can be downloaded via the hrtransformationbook.com site here.
A Credible activist is both respected, admired, listened to and offers a point of view, takes a position or challenges assumptions. This is by far the most important trait for an accepted HR professional as Wayne Brockbank states in his video on hrtransformationbook.com (Tool 6.1.). It is the foundation to be successful in the following domains.
A Culture and Change Steward shapes the new culture, builds cultural standards into HR practices and processes and coaches managers in how their actions reflect and drive culture.
A Talent Manager and Organization Designer takes care that both these HR disciplines are aligned with customer expectations, business strategy and are well integrated with each other. Good talent needs to be sustained by a good organization and vice versa an organization can only fully deliver with good talent.
A Strategy Architect has a vision how the organization can win in the future and actively participates in crafting and implementing such a strategy.
An Operational Executor makes sure that the basic transactional work gets done.
A Business Ally helps the business organize to make money and therefor needs to know the social context or setting in which the business operates and what the value chain of the business is.
Posted at
11:33PM Jan 07, 2010
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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HR Transformation
The very first article on this blog was dedicated to HR transformation, our HR transformation at Sun that we did in the mid 2000s. It is an ever reoccurring theme that is always relevant and the works from Dave Ulrich et al. became somehow the reference for “next generation HR” starting with HR Champions from 1997.
Ulrich's et al. latest book “HR Transformation” from last year references a three step approach to transformation as described by himself in this short video:
Building the Case: Understanding the business context where HR adds value, in other words why are we looking for a transformation?
HR Outcomes: What are the outcomes of transformation, what capabilities should our organization have?
HR re-engineering: How do the transformation?
Accountabilities: Who should be responsible for what during the transformation?
In an interview with David Creelman Ulrich elaborates a bit more on these steps and also explains the subtitle of the book “.. from the Outside In”. A clear commitment to always keep in mind the benefit HR will bring to customers or investors not shared by the entire community as we can see on Jon Ingham's blog. He shows with his Human Capital Management approach that the focus moves from business impacts (outside-in) to organizational outcomes – or capabilities (inside-out).
When we discuss accountabilities I think it is more generally agreed within the community that HR and Management should be working very closely to bring the companies' Human Capital to the next level while the most direct impact comes from the Managers. Gautam even taking an extreme point of view in his blog stating that HR needs to make itself redundant to survive and only focus on building skill sets to coach and train business leaders. Not a lot more to do as most low end administrative work as well as high end consulting work is outsourced to external providers.
Interesting thoughts, nevertheless HR Transformation from Ulrich remains a milestone in HR research and is a rich resource for defining HR capabilities, HR skills and HR organization including analysis tools. You find more on http://www.hrtransformationbook.com/.
Posted at
09:40AM Jan 05, 2010
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Management 2.0
It is really worth observing the research that Gary Hamel is doing. In 2007 I wrote about what he calls “Management Innovation” and connected his findings to Enterprise 2.0. Shortly afterwards he published his book Future of Management. Making organizations fit for human beings to thrive and be able to fully unfold their capabilities is his topic.
Beginning of this year he had an article in the Harvard Business Review about “25 Moon Shots for Management” that came out of a conference which brought together academics, CEOs, consultants, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Find the most essential ten on the blog he writes for the Wall Street Journal.
As Scharmer states explaining his “Presencing” approach we cannot address our 21st-century challenges with reactive mind-sets that mostly reflect the realities of the 19th and 20th centuries. Hamel takes the same starting point. He wants management to “reduce the pull of the past”, let go of control, expand employee autonomy, eliminate formal hierarchy. Means to do this are contained in some other of his “Moon Shots”: enable communities of passion, create internal markets of ideas. To “fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems” looks like a core element in this context..
The other core element for me is what deals with the leader itself: ensuring that the work of management serves a higher purpose (!), the leader as “social architect”, stretching executive time frames so that they are motivated to serve longterm stakeholder interests and the retraining of managerial minds in the direction of conceptual & systems thinking.
Needless to state that all this is about Enterprise 2.0, the management approach behind it. If I want to use the benefits of self organizing communities or as another example agile software development I need to let go of control, count on employee self discipline, do more peer review and less top down supervision. As Buhse/Stamer titled their collection of articles about Enterprise 2.0 with renowned authors such as McAffe, Weinberger, Tapscott, the new management approach is “The Art of Letting Go”.
Posted at
02:41PM Dec 22, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Leadership in Music
I was really impressed by the concert of a West African musician whom I went to see recently, Baaba Maal. It was because of the style, say even leadership style, how he managed the concert and his band.
After the first song which was very calm and quite, only himself singing accompanied by his guitar, he gave a short speech to the audience in which he layed out his musical philosophy: sharing the music, sharing the joy, celebrating together is important. An entirely communitarian approach which was prooven within the following one and a half hours, as well as his participative and democratic leadership style.
After more vibrant music had come up the Senegalese style dancers amongst the public went each on stage to give their brief performance. The audience was invited to come to stage and Baaba himself went down from the stage through the audience with one of his drum players. It was not only him holding the forefront, again and again he put every single one of his musicians to the forefront to perform their solos, to honor them and have them honored by the audience, including the old blind man, the background singer. He spent nearly entire songs near the drums at the back of the stage. It looked like he took very serious himself what he was saying, sharing the spotlight, performing the music together!
I never realized a famous musician on stage who was seeking to stand less in the spotlight than him! He came across like a calm, wise person who is a good, maybe natural leader. Impressive!
Posted at
01:07PM Nov 18, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Capitalism 3.0
Claus Otto Scharmer, who is the creator of Theory U, started some research on how to transform capitalism in order to bring our system to the next level. He takes an article from MIT Professor Johnson as a starting point. Johnson is dealing with one of two main factors which are blocking a real transformation: Power - the close ties between Wall Street and Federal Institutions. Scharmer deals with the other: Paradigm - how our thinking based on conventional economic thought is preventing us from asking some tough questions that could help us to identify the root issues of the economic crisis, how it is connected to the need for global transformation and how we can shape it in a more intentional way. One aspect of that transformation being leadership!
His ideas can be found in his paper "Seven Acupuncture Points for Shifting Capitalism" which explores the underlying system of thought that has led to the current crisis and proposes ideas for a green, inclusive and intentional ecosystem economy.
In the first part of the paper Scharmer points out the evolutionary stages of capitalism based on the notion of capitalism 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 that Peter Barnes suggested in his book "Capitalism 3.0" from 2006 and the works of the British historian Arnold Toybee. Scharmer comes up with the following:
|
Stages of Economic Evolution |
Challenge |
Response: Primary coordination mechanism |
Dominant Sector/Player |
New Primary Source of Power |
|
17th-18th Centuries: Pre Capitalist. Mercantilistic/state-driven |
Stability |
Regulation / hierarchy |
State/government |
Sticks |
|
18th-19th Centuries: Capitalism 1.0. Capital/Shareholder-driven |
Growth |
Market / competition |
State/government; Capital/business |
Carrots |
|
19th-20th Centuries: Capitalism 2.0. Stakeholder interest-driven |
Externalities |
Negotiation / dialogue |
State/government; Capital/business; Civil Society/NGO |
Norms |
|
21st Century: Capitalism 3.0. Shared ecosystem-awareness-driven |
Global Externalities |
Collective action arising from shared awareness and common will |
State/government; Capital/business; Civil Society/NGO; Cross-sector communities of creation |
Actions that arise from presencing the emerging whole |
This is the guideline what we should aim at, transform the current forms of Capitalism into Capitalism 3.0. Then Scharmer points out "Seven Acupuncture Points" which for him are practical leverage points that could shift the system from 2.0 to 3.0. The term emphasizes that the transformation requires a set of interrelated system interventions, no. 6 being related to Leadership: To reinvent leadership learning in order to facilitate "learning from the future as it emerges" rather than replicating the knowledge of the past. (please refer to Theory U for explanation of the wording). One essence for him is to move from the ideological either- or debate to a pragmatic both- and integration as part of an upgrade to 3.0.
These ideas are some of the most appealing I have heard about for some time and it nicely fits in my current mood of looking at things from an evolutionary stages standpoint and builds on my previous entries. In the context of Spiral Dynamics Scharmer shows a way how to move up the spiral.
Posted at
09:47PM Nov 01, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Personal |
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Oracle and Sun
I want to give an update on what is happening on the Sun/Oracle front since Oracle published the first advertisement in the Wall Street Journal beginning of September. There have been more very clear and strong public commitments to Sun since then expressed through Oracle's direct advertising in the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, joint partner announcements such as the Sun Oracle Database Machine, and most recently through compelling keynotes and announcements at Oracle OpenWorld.
You can also watch Scott McNealy’s keynote with Larry Ellison from Oracle OpenWorld here. This covers the commitment and strengths both companies bring to the table for customers. Scott details his pride in Sun and our employees’ great innovations, and Larry highlights the competitive power of the Sun/Oracle combination and proves that Oracle and Sun are faster than IBM.
But most importantly we got more definitive messaging on product plans. Have a look at this new overview and FAQ on the Oracle and Sun transaction that elaborates on product plans after the transaction closes and highlights the benefits that the combined companies expect to deliver, including each a paragraph on MySQL, OpenSource and OpenOffice! Make sure to regularly visit Sun.com/Oracle for further updates.
Posted at
12:32PM Oct 30, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Leadership Patterns
I want to follow-up on my last post about patterns in company culture connecting these to different Leadership styles. Hermann Küster did a deep dive into the work of Rooke/Torbert who published their research “Organizational Transformation as a Function of CEOs' Developmental Stage” already in 1998. They drew a first picture of six managerial styles and an associated developmental frame that culminated in the 2005 Harvard Business Review publication of “Seven Transformations of Leadership”. Hermann connected these to the concept of the Spiral Dynamic evolution steps as outlined before.
Similar to the approach on an organizational level this framework can be used to analyze where a leader stands and initiate a personal transformation to the next level always moving up the spiral as it is proven that leaders who operate based on a “Strategist” action logic are the most successful transformational leaders. Unfortunately in the research Rooke/Torbert did in 2005 there were only 4% of them. Knowing that progressively transforming organizations become most probably industry leaders this should be a concern. Interestingly Rooke/Torbert mention Scott McNealy, Sun's founder and former CEO, in their HBR article as belonging to the Expert type leaders which fits to my statement on the Sun culture that I made previously.
|
Theme |
Value |
Leader Type |
Leader Characteristics |
Leader Strengths |
|
TOURQUOISE = Holistic |
Sacrifice self interest to bigger whole |
Alchemist |
Generates social transformation. |
Leads society-wide transformation |
|
YELLOW = Systemic-Integrative |
Live one's potential, no harm to others |
Strategist |
Generates organizational & personal transformations. |
Transformational leader |
|
GREEN = Communitarian |
Belonging & Harmony, Consensus |
Individualist |
Interweaves competing personal and company action logic. |
Venture & consulting roles |
|
ORANGE = Achievist |
Competes for success |
Achiever |
Meets strategic goals. |
Manager, action & goal oriented |
|
BLUE = Purposeful-authoritarian, truth |
Believes in the right way |
Diplomat Expert |
Avoids conflict. Rules by logic & expertise. |
Supportive, bring people together. Individual contributor |
|
RED = Egocentric-exploitive, power |
Conquers and wins |
Opportunist |
Wins any way possible. |
emergencies & sales opportunities |
Posted at
07:31PM Oct 15, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Patterns in Company Culture
There is a really interesting approach to analyze, describe and finally transform company. For all the inspiration on this I have to thank Detego which is a Hamburg based change management consultancy. They adapted a consulting approach based on Beck/Cowan's Spiral Dynamics that they are using with clients.
In very simple words Spiral Dynamics describes the value systems of the different stages of human development from survival and kinship to integrative and holistic thinking patterns that have emerged and are still emerging nowadays. The spiral stands for the chronological evolution from survival up to holistic.
This concept can be a foundation for the transformation on an organizational level. With a specific survey the culture of a company can be measured and linked to the spiral themes. Most likely the outcome will be a mix of different systems on the spiral. The intention should be to move up the spiral to the so called second tier themes Systemic-Integrative and Holistic.
|
Theme |
Value |
Decision Making* |
Education* |
|
TOURQUOISE = Holistic |
Sacrifice self interest to bigger whole |
Blend natural flows, look up/downstream, plan for long range, life gets spoils |
Access to world, blend feelings & tech, bring past to life, maximize brain |
|
YELLOW = Systemic-Integrative |
Live one's potential, no harm to others |
Highly principled, knowledge centered, resolved paradoxes, competent gets spoils |
Becomes self-directed, whole-day package, tuned to interests |
|
GREEN = Communitarian |
Belonging & Harmony |
Reach consensus, all must collaborate, accept any input, communal get spoils |
To explore feelings, shared experiences, social development, learn cooperation |
|
ORANGE = Achievist, prosperity |
Competes for success |
Bottom-line results, test options for best, consult experts, successful win spoils |
Experiments to win, High tech – high status, how to win niches, mentors and guides |
|
BLUE = Purposeful-authoritarian, truth |
Believes in the right way |
Orders from authority, do right – obey rules, adhere to tradition, righteous earn spoils |
Truth from authority, traditional stair steps, moralistic lessons, punishment for errors |
|
RED = Egocentric-exploitive, power |
Conquers and wins |
Tough-one dictates, what gets respect, what feels good now, powerful grab spoils |
Rewards for learning, tough-love tactics, work on respect, controlled freedom |
*from Beck/Cowan, Spiral Dynamics 1996 and 2006, p.332
Let's take a moment and look at Sun's culture from this perspective. I believe we had a strong conviction and belief in our way of being open, doing open source, being an innovation leader, competing against the bigger players in the market, those who lock customers in, etc. (remember the fun that Scott used to make of certain of our competitors during his time as CEO) which is an aspect of BLUE (high sense of purpose, believing in the cause).
That element created a lot of common values, there was a strong element of “standing together”, a strong identification with the company and it's products, teaming up was valued a lot and then we were very consensus oriented which all could characterize the Sun culture having a strong GREEN (communitarian) element.
The Sun culture will soon be merged with the Oracle one. From a global perspective I am really curious to see more holistic patterns appear in our lives, using collective human intelligence to work on large scale problems without sacrificing individuality. I strongly believe that this is what our world needs and it is good to see it is emerging.
Posted at
09:19PM Oct 13, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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What companies can learn from Orchestras
Wow, this was really impressive! Just coming back from a presentation (no slides – just music!) with Christian Gansch a renown conductor, music producer, consultant and book author. In his books he points out what companies can learn from Orchestras. In his presentation he explained what a complex organization an orchestra is with a lot of departments and department managers. He gave insight in how it is managed by the conductor and how it is also managing itself.
To thrive for highest “customer satisfaction” all 120 pretty eccentric personalities of that orchestra need to stand and work together very closely and sensitively. This needs a lot of respect for one another, it needs tolerance to give in and acknowledge that for example if the Oboe realizes it cannot hold breath long enough when the violin plays a specific part that part needs to be played differently although it maybe more difficult for the violinists. After all listeners judge the whole sound of the orchestra and not just the Oboe.
The conductor also needs to value and respect each individual musician but also give each of them feed-back and not avoid conflict. In order to have a full harmony in the performance there might be conflict in the rehearsals (there are four of them in general and the last one traditionally is not interrupted by the conductor). On the other hand he needs to have a strong competence in perceiving the individual musicians to for example adapt some parts to a breath loosing singer who is not 100% on top that day. The latter reminded me of the leadership capabilities Scharmer is mentioning like listening, observing, sensing.
Overall this presentation was very inspiring, it came across with a lot of enthusiasm and passion. Here is an interview with Christian, unfortunately in German. Many thanks to HRD, Human Resources Development Consulting in Hamburg, who made this possible for their 20th anniversary!
Posted at
10:37PM Oct 08, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Community Equity
I wanted to make you aware of the Innovation Blog in which host Hal Stern interviews Peter Reiser on the concept of Community Equity. You can access the conversation at Blogtalkradio where you also find other interesting conversations on the social media topic or download the podcast via iTunes.
The basic idea of “Community Equity” is to measure contribution and participation of individuals in a community. I believe this is extremely HR relevant as from the Human Resources standpoint it can help putting the right people to the right projects or into the right jobs (skill management!), motivate people to get the best out of them, to collaborate and learn from the community and finally most importantly reward them! There is much more detail to this that Peter explains on his blog like the Tag Equity which shows the real value of a tag not just how much it has been used by relating all the different aspects of contribution to a specific tag.
I really think these features can help a lot building communities and systematically using knowledge and skills in an enterprise context. As there is a lot of mathematical algorithms and complexity to this it has been patented but is available opensource.
Very interesting will be how the usage of social equity can evolve by mashing it up with semantic web technologies. We would then talk about concept equity. Some of our guys are contributing to the EU KIWI project subtitled "Collaborative Knowledge Management, powered by the Semantic Web”.
As a side note Nielsen Norman Group published an interesting report on the usage of Social Software on Intranets in which Sun participated as one of 14 companies which were interviewed. You find a summary here.
Posted at
04:40PM Sep 29, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Bright Future for Sun
Great to see all the positive things happening these days in connection with our transition to Oracle. For example this product announcement which will be live webcasted tomorrow! Or Larry's ad from the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week which you find here below. Truly amazing!
Posted at
12:41PM Sep 14, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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