How Microsoft falls

I know this is not the usual content of this blog, but an insight hit me today and I wanted to pass it along. It came from reading this Business Week story about the high prices Microsoft wants for Windows 7.

Microsoft's revenues have two main drivers: the Windows operating system and the Office suite. Now what happens to those revenues when Apple and Google release cradles for their phones (and the iPod Touch) that will drive a full-size monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, and printer - with built-in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari browsers to access cloud applications? (like Google Apps) If I have modest computing needs - web, email, pictures, video, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. - why do I need a full-size PC or laptop with Windows and Office if my phone can drive everything I need to do and fit in my pocket to boot? As an added bonus, I can also choose to drop my home broadband service and go all 3G. All of a sudden Windows PCs and laptops are a niche market for high-end gamers and graphics.

It will take a little while to get there - faster phone processors, more memory and storage, better browsers that are stronger application platforms, iTunes conversion to a cloud app - but the trend seems inevitable, and the transition could happen very quickly once it starts. Microsoft has been able to drop Windows prices to hold on to netbooks (vs. Linux), but a price drop won't be able to stop this wave.

Manage by Commitments, Not Hierarchies

Some excerpts from a great post at bnet (highlights mine):

If you look at how people think about getting things done in large complex organizations, they basically sort stuff into three broad categories. The first is about power: the organization is a hierarchy where information flows up and orders flow down, and you do what you’re told or you’re fired or demoted. … This tends to create silos: the hierarchy is very up and down and doesn’t work well for work that requires cooperation across different units or functions. It’s pretty slow as well; it takes a long time for information to get up the structure and for orders to find their way down.

Another approach that really started to gain traction in the 1950s in Japan, and became more well-known in the 1980s, is management by process... the organization as a bundle of processes. Six Sigma…TQM [Total Quality Management]…all of these are variations on the same theme. This is hugely helpful—it allows you to squeeze out excess resources and continuously improve on what you do. Bit here we also have limitations, probably the biggest one being that standardization gets in the way of innovation... the higher an organization’s commitment to standardized processes, the lower the level of innovation.

Which brings us to our third approach: managing by commitment. Here, we look at an organization as a network of overlapping, continually evolving promises that people make to each other to get things done. The advantage and the power of this approach is that it lends itself quite well to situations that cannot be standardized: emergent strategies, innovation, one-offs or one-of-a-kind crises. It also works well when you coordinate among people who don’t report to you: suppliers, distributors, etc. And that kind of work is quite important. There was a study done a few years ago that said 40 percent of all employees in the United States added most of their value to their organizations through these non-routine activities. And about 70 percent of the growth of employees in the U.S. was among people who did this non-routine, non-hierarchical work, so it’s a big idea in the context of the economy as a whole.

...commitments within their teams. The most effective have five characteristics. First, they are public. They’re made publicly and their progress is tracked publicly. Next, they’re active. Parties understand what they are agreeing to and what each party is requesting; people don’t just nod, they really have to take responsibility for the commitment. Third, these are voluntary. The other party has the option to say something other than “yes”; they can refuse or make counteroffers. Fourth, commitments are explicit: it has to be clear who is committing. These aren’t committees making promises, they are individuals. And it works best when it is perfectly clear to whom the commitment is made. And fifth and finally, they’re motivating: the rationale is made clear…why it matters to the individuals and the organization is made clear.

More on this approach in a followup post here.

WorldBlu announces Most Democratic Workplaces 2009

Their list is not about "democratic" companies in the "everybody votes" sense, but those that truly empower employees at all levels.

"The purpose of the WorldBlu List is to acknowledge the most successful organizations in the world that are choosing to operate, not using the traditional, command and control model of business, but a democratic model based freedom and possibility.

In these challenging economic times, nothing could be more relevant than honoring organizations built on transparency, accountability, integrity, and fairness that give us all a reason to believe that business can truly uphold and model humanity's highest values."

The list proves that these principles are not just theoretical, but work in real organizations in the real world. Check it out.

From command-and-control to collaboration-and-teamwork

Cisco CEO John Chambers explains how moving beyond command-and-control leadership has enabled the company to innovate more quickly, using collaboration and teamwork.

Social media's impact on companies

Social Media Science has a great article on both the internal and external impact of social media on organizations. The internal section matches up exactly with Organization 2.0:

Every day evidence mounts to support the need for companies to transform the way they operate internally. For the most part this is no longer even a matter for debate. Too much social evidence has already accumulated on this subject.
...
...put into place the social media channels and systems that will allow the corporate community itself to communicate, reward, suggest, ask questions, offer solutions, raise issues, list complaints, and other engagements designed to produce a company united in vision and purpose.

The section on the external impact (in terms of marketing and branding) is right on too. In fact, we're trying to expand OpenTeams' efforts in this regard. We now have groups on

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook

Follow the links to sign up and join the Organization 2.0 conversation.

More on Management's Grand Challenges

Dr. Gary Hamel has an article in the new February issue of Harvard Business Review titled "Moon Shots for Management". It is a fantastic article, unfortunately limited to subscribers. I have posted on this topic before, but this article goes into much more detail and articulates its points better. It's in absolute alignment with everything we hope to facilitate with OpenTeams and Organization 2.0. The summary:

Idea in Brief

• “Modern” management, much of which dates back to the late nineteenth century, has reached the limits of improvement.

• To lay out a road map for reinvention, a group of scholars and CEOs has created 25 ambitious challenges.

• Unless management innovators tackle those issues, companies will be unable to cope with tomorrow’s volatile world.

Management's Grand Challenges

1: Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.

2: Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.

3: Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology, political science, and theology.

4: Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.

5: Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow’s management systems.

6: Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.

7: Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.

8: Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.

9: Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.

10: De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.

11: Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.

12: Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process in which share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

13: Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.

14: Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. We need to discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.

15: Create a democracy of information. Companies need information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.

16: Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than the past.

17: Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

18: Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies’ resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.

19: Depoliticize decision making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization and beyond.

20: Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What’s needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.

21: Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.

22: Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.

23: Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the firm’s boundaries and can render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building and shaping complex ecosystems.

24: Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow’s management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice, and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.

25: Retrain managerial minds. Managers’ deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.

BNET on business democracies

Geoffrey James at BNET has an interesting post on whether businesses should be democracies. An excerpt:

...if free market democracy is such a good idea, why are most businesses run like military dictatorships?

Think about it! Most companies:

• Are controlled by a junta of corporate “officers.”
• Strive for tight top-down financial controls.
• Spy upon employee emails and activities.
• Obsess endlessly about the chain of command.
• Dictate rules and regulations from the top.

By contrast, I’ve seen very few companies that encourage internal competition beyond initial R&D efforts, and I’ve NEVER seen a company where the employees get to vote for the new President. Heck, even the stockholders don’t get to do that.

It seems to me that if CEOs really believed the Republican “talk”, they’d “walk the talk” and voluntarily set up their companies with internal free market economies and hold regular elections to determine who should manage each function.

However, since no CEO is willing to put his money where his mouth is, it’s logical to assume that most CEOs secretly believe, consciously or unconsciously, that organizations are better off when they’re run like military dictatorships.

With all due respect, I disagree. In my view, most corporations are successful in spite of top-down management, rather than because of it. In fact, I think that most businesses would benefit if the employees were running more of the show.

While I agree with most of his points, I think the emphasis of the solution needs to be free markets more than democracy. Silicon Valley is successful because it allows hundreds of startups to bloom and the market sorts out the winners from the losers - not because they hold some sort of big vote every year to pick the "best" startups. Companies need to shift their thinking from "managers" controlling departments to "internal venture capitalists" putting resources behind the best ideas, and they should be judged on the results of those investments. Talent needs the freedom to move to the most promising and best funded projects. (more on Organization 2.0 here)

To quote Hamel:

“Market-based economies outperform those that are centrally planned. …markets are better than hierarchies at getting the right resources behind the right opportunities at the right time. The average company, though, operates more like a socialist state than an unfettered market. A hierarchy may be an effective mechanism for applying resources, but it is an imperfect device for allocating resources.”

–“The Quest for Resilience” by Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas, Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2003

We designed OpenTeams to act as that self-organizing ideas+talent+$ marketplace for projects.

I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Thoughts and takeaways from the WorldBlu conference

So I finally have some time to blog about the WorldBlu conference on democratic organizations last month in New York. Other blog posts do a great job of covering the conference details - here, here (where I was quoted), and here (including summaries of each speaker) - so I'm just going to post my own key takeaways and thoughts rather than all my notes. Here are some items I highlighted in my notes:

• When people don't have a self-governance model, they want a strong directive leader (with the negatives that entails).
• Democracy needs structure, or power becomes personal.
• The vast majority of people don't like their jobs (yet rather than recognize this as a symptom of a serious flaw in how we run our organizations, it's simply accepted as "the way things are").
• More than 80% of managers are poor leaders.
• 50+% of peoples' time is spent fighting institutional bureaucracies.
• "First, we shape our structures... and then our structures shape us." -Winston Churchill
• Results-only work environments (ROWE) are a great step in the right direction.
• "We long for community, but settle for institutions."
• Winning companies stand for powerful ideas.
• Leadership = creating an architecture of participation (not "genius on the mountain")
  

The reality is that most of the featured organizations were more benevolent autocracies than democracies. One exception is the co-op model, which got a presentation from Equal Exchange and was also recently featured in a Houston Chronicle op-ed. Co-ops are 100% owned by their workers (and, in some cases, their customers). While I see some benefits from the model, I don't think it's "the answer". For one thing, I think most of the world's enterprises need outside equity investment to be financially viable. There also has to be some mechanism for efficiently deploying capital where it's needed, as well as for investors to diversify their investments beyond their own firms to reduce risk.

But I have another issue with the co-op model. They talk about the need for empowerment, control, and trust, but then talk about how their model is like a city government. I don't think people feel all that much control, empowerment, and trust from their city government, so duplicating that model doesn't seem all that helpful. Democracy is better than autocracy, but liberty is even better than democracy (who would you prefer controlling you: dictator, elected leader, or nobody?). Liberty means free markets. How can we get that model inside organizations? (more here: Organization 2.0 briefing)

This leads to my bigger picture issue. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey talks about the damaged brand of capitalism worldwide and the deep unpopularity of big business (not to mention the other big command-and-control organizations: government bureaucracies). A few hundred years ago, scholars and nobles lamented all the bad kings (vs. the few good ones) and wrote about improving monarchies. "How can we get more good, enlightened kings?" But our Founding Fathers saw the futility of articulating principles for a better monarchy. They moved on to a whole new concept, representative democracy, and the rest, as they say, is history. As I attend conferences like WorldBlu and, later this week, Catalyzing Conscious Capitalism, I find myself asking:

Are we just trying to foster more "benevolent monarchies", or are we really moving on to create our equivalent of "democracy": a completely new form of organization that breaks from the old, dysfunctional, command-and-control, hierarchical model?

Another award for OpenTeams

Best of the Web online project management applications for CEOs and entrepreneurs, by CEOworld magazine.

I've been a little swamped since returning from NYC, but I hope to write a longer post on the WorldBlu conference soon, based on my notes. There was no wireless internet at the conference, so liveblogging didn't work out.

Headed to WorldBlu Live conference in NYC

Looks like a great event on democratic organizations. If you'll be there, find me and let's chat about next generation organizations (or, my new label, Organization 2.0 - short overview pdf with 4 content charts here). Here's quick head shot so you know who to look for.

I might do a little live blogging from the conference, or at least report back afterwards.

Benefits of social media in the workplace

I rediscovered this old Hinchcliffe blog post recently, which articulates a still-valid set of benefits for enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 tools like OpenTeams:

• More ad hoc collaboration between employees who can find each other’s work and team together.
• More globally persistent, discoverable business information is made available over time.
• Social media tends to capture more institutional knowledge that’s reusable.
• A deep hyperlink infrastructure begins to form, built by continuously by workers using social media. tools to forge links, making business information more discoverable.
• Tagging and other emergent organization methods allow business information to be organized and cross-referenced from every point of view.
• More efficient access to information as more business information becomes available internally and externally via syndication.
• Potentially higher levels of innovation and productivity as more previously unavailable enterprise thinking is available to be accessed, repurposed, and built on top of.
• Increased efficiency in conversations: social media scales up to mostly resource and time friendly conversations among thousands of asynchronous participants, yet excludes those uninterested in them, unlike e-mail distribution lists and conference calls.

Management's Grand Challenges

Coming out of Dr. Hamel's "Inventing the Future of Management" summit is this excellent document (introduced by this blog post) summing up the 25 challenges of reinventing management (i.e. Management 2.0). Here are the 25, although it's well worth diving into the details behind them in the document. Those details help flesh out the real issue behind each of these pretty abstract items.

1. Reconstruct the philosophical foundations of management
2. Fully operationalize the ideas of community and citizenship
3. Seek orientation in a higher and broader purpose
4. Distribute (share) the work of creating direction and strategy
5. Develop holistic performance measures
6. Stretch executive timeframes and perspectives
7. Increase trust, reduce fear
8. Create a democracy of information
9. Expand and exploit intellectual variety
10. Substantially reduce the gravitational pull of the past
11. Enlarge and empower the pro-change constituency
12. Expand the freedom for autonomous action
13. Create more space for emergent strategies
14. Create an internal market for ideas, talent and resources
15. De-structure and dis-aggregate the formal organization
16. Dramatically diminish the influence of (formal) hierarchy
17. Reinvent the work of executive leadership
18. De-politicize decision-making
19. Reinvent the means of “control”
20. Transcend the efficiency vs. innovation trade-off
21. (Further) Unleash human imagination
22. Enable communities of passion
23. Create (more) open organizations
24. Rethink management thinking
25. Humanize (the language of) business

Hamel's Management Innovation Summit

Dr. Hamel recently got 35 of the world's biggest thinkers together in a room for two days to discuss the future of management (his four core questions discussed here). If you want to know what they discussed, check out this article, this blog post, these in-depth series of blog posts (with graphics and pics), as well as a video interview with Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Alas, no post yet from Hamel himself.

Update: Here it is.

The moral purpose of capitalism

Some thoughts on the topic in a comment I posted on John Mackey's blog (Founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market).

Four questions (and answers) on reinventing management

Dr. Gary Hamel, famous author of "Competing for the Future" and "The Future of Management" - and recently ranked by the Wall Street Journal as their #1 business guru - has posted four questions on reinventing management on his blog. These questions will be posed to 35 top thinkers at a "Reinventing the Future of Management" conference next week in California. I dug through my notes on our Open Model Entrepreneurial Organization concept, and then posted a comment with my best shot at answers to the four questions. I will also repost those answers here:

1. What are the deep-seated impediments, or “design flaws,” that limit the capacity of organizations to adapt (to change without trauma); to innovate (to mobilize the imagination of everyone, every day); and to engage (to create environments that inspire extraordinary contributions)?

There are three core “design flaws,” each of which matches generally with one of the three challenges, although they also overlap and interrelate:

1) Weak adaptation: Flat salaries based on time passing (rather than achievements or being billable for clear tasks on a project), combined with people fiercely defending the “turf” of their territorial job descriptions, create an inertial bias towards stasis (“just mark time as comfortably as you can to make money, and be passive aggressive to make sure nobody rocks the boat in your job domain”). Only top management has an incentive to drive through disruptive change, but they’re pushing against an incredibly resistant organization with tremendous inertia.

2) Weak innovation: A hierarchical chain of bosses, any of which can say “No” to kill any new ideas, or to anything that threatens their power, interests, or the status quo.

3) Weak engagement: The straight-jacket of constraining job descriptions. Few employees are likely to be in the “Flow” state of optimal productivity (not bored or burned-out/overwhelmed) unless they can control their portfolio of roles to stay in that “zone.”

2. Given these systemic impediments, and the new demands that will confront organizations in the years ahead, what should be the agenda for 21st century management innovators? That is, what are the “moonshot challenges” that must be addressed if we are to create organizations that are truly fit for the future?

Organizations need to be more like the free market Silicon Valley ecosystem internally:

1) Compensation driven by value-added accomplishments (billable time for clear tasks on projects) rather than general time passing, creating an instant constituency for change, improvement, and adaptation.

2) Nobody’s “turf” is sacred – anybody can be challenged at any time.

3) A new idea can seek support/resources from multiple sources throughout the organization – no single gatekeeper, or, worse, a chain of hierarchical gatekeepers. Imagine if Silicon Valley had only one VC firm…

4) Replace single jobs with portfolios of ever-shifting roles so people can keep themselves in the highly engaged “Flow” state. Employees can trade roles with each other – for instance, passing down a role that has become stale and boring for one employee to another who sees it as a promotion to a new and challenging opportunity. This portfolio approach will also help reduce unproductive territorial defensiveness of job “turf,” since it’s only one part of their broader portfolio of roles.

The moonshot challenge is this: How can organizations become more like the Silicon Valley ecosystem internally, while avoiding anarchy, presenting a single face to the world, and acting in a cohesive strategic direction?

3. Can we imagine, even in outline form, some potential solutions to these challenges, and if so, what sorts of experiments might be useful in helping us to test these ideas in real world settings?

At OpenTeams, we call it the Open Model Entrepreneurial Organization (OMEO). The “entrepreneurial” part is obvious from the description above. What the “open model” is referring to is breaking up our single monolithic hierarchical organization maps into two parts: 1) an “open model” of all the assets, systems, processes, and day-to-day operational roles in the company, and 2) a collection self-organizing employees (with their own portfolios of project-based roles) as well as funding sponsors (“internal venture capitalists”) to support projects to change the open model (adapt, innovate, improve). Of course, individuals could straddle both parts of the organization with a combination of both operational and project roles – or even an internal venture capitalist role if they are given discretionary time to invest (as Google famously does with their engineers’ “20% time”).

4. More generally, what could be done to help accelerate the evolution of management in the years to come, that is, what is it that limits the pace of management innovation and how might these limits be overcome?

If you look at the case study of the transition from Manufacturing 1.0 (Ford) to 2.0 (Toyota), it took Edwards Deming influencing a prototype flagship company that became the paragon role model for industrial companies around the world. We need a similar prototype flagship for Management 2.0. It must be widely acknowledged as far more adaptive, innovative, and engaging than normal companies, and it must do it with a *system*, not just culture or leadership personalities. Once Management 2.0 has proven itself in a high-profile company, other companies will flock to emulate it, just as they did for Toyota.

Organizational Democracy and WorldBlu

I got to meet with Traci Fenton of WorldBlu in Austin on Monday. WorldBlu supports organizational democracy with activities like the annual WorldBlu List of the Most Democratic Workplaces and the WorldBlu Live conference in NYC this October, and Traci is as passionate about changing organizations as I am (she even has her own blog here). Her emphasis is on "democratic," while mine is on "entrepreneurial" - but our core principals are essentially the same. I highly encourage you to learn more and consider attending the conference this Fall. Hope to see you there!

Demo audio fixed

We recently discovered that the audio in our demo screencast could sound garbled when played in the newest version of Adobe's Flash player. We have implemented the fix, so if you've had trouble with our demo before, please try it again. It really is the best way to come up to speed quickly on the power of OpenTeams.

"Future of Management" in a nutshell

Came across this great set of bullet-points summarizing Dr. Gary Hamel's "Future of Management" organizations - what he calls "Management 2.0" and what we call "The Entrepreneurial Organization":

* Everyone has a voice.
* The tools of creativity are widely distributed.
* Its easy and cheap to experiment.
* Capability counts for more than credentials and titles.
* Commitment is voluntary.
* Power is granted from below.
* Authority is fluid and contingent on value-added.
* The only hierarchies are “natural” hierarchies.
* Communities are self-defining. Individuals are richly empowered with information.
* Just about everything is decentralized.
* Ideas compete on an equal footing.
* It’s easy for buyers and sellers to find each other.
* Resources are free to follow opportunities.
* Decisions are peer-based.

Interview on TrenchMice

Here. It's interesting he worries our price point might be a bit premium vs. some of the free tools out there. We've been getting a lot opposite feedback that our price point may be too low for many enterprises looking for a high level of support. Of course we like to think we've found the right middle-ground, with good value combined with excellent support.

I appreciate his optimistic view of our long-term prospects, but let's hope things progress faster than he predicts. This is the lightning-fast world of Web 2.0, right?

A new review

One of the more comprehensive reviews of OpenTeams, which concludes:

OpenTeams is an impressive service... OpenTeams’ high point is adding structure to a wiki. If you need to organize pages into folders, create outlines, track files, and work with a group of users, OpenTeams is definitely worth checking out.

It's also a pretty good overview of how to actually use OpenTeams. Check it out.

The workforce disengagement problem

Came across this post on the problem of widespread disengagement in the workforce, based on a Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study. The excerpt:

Just 21% of the employees surveyed around the world are engaged in their work, meaning they're willing to go the extra mile to help their companies succeed. Fully 38% are partly to fully disengaged. The result is a gap - which Towers Perrin has dubbed the "engagement gap" - between the discretionary effort companies need and people actually want to invest and companies' effectiveness in channeling this effort to enhance performance.

The study found that companies with the highest levels of employee engagement achieve better financial results and are more successful in retaining their most valued employees than companies with lower levels of engagement.

"It's impossible to overstate the importance of an engaged workforce on a company's bottom line," said Julie Gebauer, managing director and leader of Towers Perrin's Workforce Effectiveness consulting practice. "The Global Workforce Study establishes a definitive link between levels of engagement and financial performance and, for the first time, begins to quantify that link. It demonstrates that, at a time when companies are looking for every source of competitive advantage, the workforce itself represents the largest reservoir of untapped potential."

The most striking data about the linkage between employee engagement and financial performance come from a study of 40 global companies which involved a regression analysis of company financial results against engagement data. It found that firms with the highest percentage of engaged employees collectively increased operating income 19% and earnings per share 28% year to year. Those companies with the lowest percentage of engaged employees showed year-to-year declines of 33% in operating income and 11% in earnings per share.

OpenTeams increases employee engagement by helping them self-organize into entrepreneurial teams around innovative ideas. Entrepreneurs are the personification of "engagement," and having more of that spirit within an organization can do wonders for motivating employees to tap their full potential.

Radio Interview and Elevator Pitch

I recently "elevator pitched" OpenTeams at the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship IT/Web 2.0 Forum. If you'd like to hear the two minute pitch, they recorded it here. I'll admit I was a little rough at first as I tried to avoid using my notes much, but I soon realized I was running out of time fast (they had a 90 second countdown timer), and smoothly finished out by reading straight from my notes. Not great speech etiquette, but I had to hit a lot of their checklist items in a very short time.

The pitch caught Russ Capper's attention from The BusinessMakers Radio Show, and he very generously asked me to participate in a longer interview at their studios about OpenTeams and my background. I'm used to communications where I have ample editing time (email, blog, documents, Powerpoint, even speech writing), so real-time, live-recorded Q&A was a bit nerve-wracking. But it went surprisingly well, and they did a fantastic editing job, cleaning it up into a very tight 18-minute segment you can hear here, or even download it as a podcast.

Opportunistic Innovation as Strategy

Caught this book review of "Strategic Intuition" in the Wall Street Journal, which is a great fit with what OpenTeams can do for your company:

Set big goals. Do whatever it takes to reach them. These muscular sentences form the core of commencement addresses, business-advice books, political movements and even the United Nations approach to global poverty. In "Strategic Intuition," a concise and entertaining treatise on human achievement, William Duggan says that such pronouncements are not only banal but wrong.

Mr. Duggan, who teaches strategy at Columbia Business School, argues that the commonplace formula has it backward. Instead of setting goals first, he says, it is better to watch for opportunities with large payoffs at low costs and only then set your goals. That is what innovators throughout history have done, as Mr. Duggan shows in a deliriously fast-paced tour of history.

...

One of the insights of "Strategic Intuition" is that business makes progress by following the opportunistic innovation model, while governments and international-aid agencies aim repetitively at rigid social goals.

...

If there are still businessmen who feel compelled to follow a fixed-goal plan -- missing out on the profits of opportunistic flexibility -- then at least there is the free market to punish them. Market feedback is surely one big reason that we have so many innovative entrepreneurs.

Of course, OpenTeams is a great environment for sparking and developing opportunistic innovation options by tapping the wisdom and insights of employees at all levels.

The case for collaboration software over email

The St. Edmonds Lab at NetX blog has a nice plug for OpenTeams, but what's great about the post is their creative articulation of the need for collaborative software instead of email (specifically in the context of a creative ad agency). This graphic hilariously makes the point:


Here's a scary statistic:

Research shows that staff source between 50%-75% of information relevant to their work from other people. It also shows that more than 80% of an organisation’s digitised information resides on individual hard drives and inside personal files. This means that individuals - rather than the organisation - control the bulk of essential knowledge within an agency.

And a very pointed conclusion:

The need for better knowledge management in creative processes is evident. Campaigns are becoming more and more sophisticated to succeed in a fragmented media environment. If agencies don’t learn from mistakes and successes, they can never be better than their current workforce allows them to be. And since any key person leaves an organization at some point, they take with them a wide spectrum of extremely valuable knowledge, including industry and target group insights, confidential data and relationships. If the agency’s creative knowledge then only consists of static files on servers, a bunch of emails and the rented brains of the current employees, it isn’t much more than a name with a reputation, a building and a fancy coffee machine.

McKinsey on innovative management

The McKinsey Quarterly just released an interview with Gary Hamel, author of The Future of Management (see previous post), and Lowell Bryan, author of Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth From Talent in the 21st Century Organization, on the future of management. Here's part of the abstract summary:

The authors discuss how traditional management models do not enable businesses to adequately respond to today’s competitive forces. In a new environment that places a premium on collaboration and talent, they view old organizational structures as impediments to innovation and creative strategy

It is well worth registering to read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts which caught my eye and seem particularly relevant to OpenTeams and The Entrepreneurial Organization:

The Internet is making it possible to amplify and aggregate human capabilities in ways never before possible. But most CEOs don’t yet understand how dramatically these developments will change the way companies organize, lead, allocate resources, plan, hire, and motivate—in other words, how new technology will change the work of managing. Throughout history, technological innovation has always preceded organizational and management innovation.

...

I think the technological revolution that occurred in the past 15 years was basically equivalent to the industrial revolution—a fundamental discontinuity. And just as technologies have S curves, the technology of management also has an S curve.

...

The availability of powerful new tools for coordinating human effort will profoundly change the work of management over the next few years.

...

Highly talented people don’t need, and are unlikely to put up with, an overtly hierarchical management model. Increasingly, the work of management won’t be done by managers. It will be pushed out to the periphery. It will be embedded in systems. I think we’re on the verge of what I would call a postmanagerial society. The idea that you mobilize human labor through a hierarchy of overseers and bureaucrats and administrators is going to look extraordinarily antiquated a decade or two from now.

...

The outlines of the 21st-century management model are already clear. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position.

...

I don’t think you shuffle your way from one S curve to the other. You have to jump. Frederick Taylor often talked about the need for a mental revolution when he was trying to move organizations from the craft-based model to the factory model. Today we need a new mental revolution.

...

Assuming you’re well managed, the direction that most companies need to go in is improving how they enable their people to collaborate with one another at much lower cost by dramatically reducing unproductive search and coordination costs. And that means deploying such devices as talent marketplaces, knowledge marketplaces, and formal networks to make intangible assets flow throughout the company, as opposed to going up and down vertical chains of command.

...

Ideas are being monetized in ways never before possible, and the world is a richer place. I’m not just talking about creating financial wealth; I’m talking about a much more stimulating work environment, with more interesting jobs for employees to create more valuable products and services for the world’s consumers. It is just an incredibly exciting time to be alive.

Hear, hear!

The Future of Management

Gary Hamel, of "Competing for the Future" and "Leading the Revolution" fame, has a new book coming out in October titled "The Future of Management". I found out about it from a Wall Street Journal article where he holds up Google as one of the top examples:

In "The Future of Management," a book due to be published this autumn, Mr. Hamel argues that Google's innovations go beyond the fine points of search-engine algorithms -- extending into big, enduring aspects of general management. The Mountain View, Calif., company is packed with intriguing, distinctive ways of running itself, he says. These include radical decentralization; small, self-managing teams; a just-try-it approach to rolling out new products before they are fully finished; and a willingness to let engineers spend sizable chunks of time on offbeat projects.

Put it together, Mr. Hamel contends, and Google is committed to building a company that can evolve as fast as the Web. That is crucial in today's turbulent business climate. Old ways stop working. Powerful new rivals pop up in the most unexpected places. Many well-established companies, even renowned ones, thrash helplessly as traditional strategies lose their potency.

Reading book excerpts, as well as watching some of his videos here, here, and here, I was deeply inspired, and am really looking forward to the book. There are many similarities to the concepts we espouse in The Entrepreneurial Organization, as well as with the Enterprise 2.0 movement, which is discovering the management changes as a side effect of the new Web 2.0 technologies inside the enterprise.

Just like the first wave of client-server and ERP computing helped enable the business process re-engineering movement of the '90s, it's looking more and more like new social software tools will spark another revolution in the management of organizations - and OpenTeams wants to lead the way along with Dr. Hamel, Google, and others.

Update: Another great excerpt of the book in Fortune.

BarCamp reactions to OpenTeams

Some nice excerpts from Houston Chronicle technology journalist Dwight Silverman's blog, where he posted his Twitter feed from BarCamp Houston.

dsilverman OpenTeams seems to make wikis much friendlier, more usable. I've always found wikis klunky to use; this is much more intutitive.

deneyterrio Agrees with dsilverman. Openteams is more robust than basecamp

dsilverman The OpenTeams app looks a lot like the 3-vertical-pane layout in Outlook 2003/2007. Biz types will get that a lot faster than wiki interface

Always nice to hear some affirmation...

OpenTeams delegation at BarCamp Houston

Great event and our presentation was very well received. Lots of good questions and positive feedback during and afterward. I didn't know what to expect going in, and was very pleasantly surprised. Thanks everybody!

Here's the Flickr slideshow with Alex, Tim, and I at BarCamp.

Startup Houston blog covers OpenTeams

Josh and I had a long conversation at Starbucks. Good stuff.

...a pretty slick tool that is like a wiki on steroids.

What I find refreshing about OpenTeams is their focus on the enterprise market. So much of the social media revolution has been consumer oriented and advertising based.

Often, the only companies that benefit from deployment of collaboration tools are large corporations with impressive IT budgets that provide for streamlining innovation processes. OpenTeams has a tool that is affordable and ready to deploy within minutes.

Read the whole thing.

The wiki workplace: How web 2.0 changes everything

Yes, this slideshow presentation is being sponsored by one of our competitors, SocialText, but it's still a good overview of how web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis will change how organizations work. Jump to the 49 minute mark for the good stuff, which ends at around minute 25, for a total of 24 minutes. Also a nice list of wiki benefits on a slide at the 22 minute mark. Thanks to Michael Stephen Ruiz for the pointer.

Invites using your email address book, plus international payments

We just rolled out a new feature and an improvement to OpenTeams. The new feature may sound small, but eliminates a major hassle. Previously, to invite others to a space, you had to add their emails to a web form. If you're like me, you don't know email addresses - you rely on your email program's address book to keep up with those. That means you're looking at some tedious copy-and-pasting to use a web form, a task that gets particularly onerous as the number of invitees increases.

We now let you invite others to a space using your personal email address book. We do this by sending you an email, then you forward it to the other invitees while CC'ing it back to us. We strip out the names and emails from the To field and add them as authorized users on the space. We've also included several security measures: the emails contain a security token that expires in 24 hours (you have that long to forward it and cc us - the invitees can take as long as they like to join), they can only be forwarded once (and then the token expires), and when we receive it back, we instantly send you a confirmation email with the list of invitees that have been added to the space.

Just like web-form invites, you can invite people whether or not they have OpenTeams accounts. If they already have an account, they simply get notified and the space gets added to their list. If they don't have an account, we'll send them an email to create an account, and then they will automatically have access to the space once they validate on their email address.

In addition to this new feature, we also upgraded our payments processing to handle credit cards from around the world, rather than just the USA. We've gotten a lot of interest from places like Canada, France, and Brazil (among many others), so obviously this is an important improvement.

So if you've been trying out OpenTeams, but haven't yet invited others to a space, or, well, paid us (for your own account or to sponsor others) - now's your chance! And don't forget our "double your money" 2-for-1 sale celebrating our launch, which we will probably end in the near future - so grab the free money while you can!

Solution Watch in-depth review of OpenTeams

This is probably the most in-depth review of OpenTeams' functionality to-date, with some good screenshots. It's nice to see briefing outlines get some specific recognition. They're a powerful, but often overlooked, feature of OpenTeams.

"Reinventing the Wiki with OpenTeams"

Great success at Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies Conference

Tim and I just got back from several days in Boston as exhibitors at the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies conference. I'm very happy to say it was a roaring success. We got lots of interest and positive feedback from analysts, media, and potential customers. The conference sessions also reinforced all sorts of themes we built OpenTeams around: increasing employee engagement, centering software around people rather than technology, the power of emergence, the importance of innovation, current problems with wikis, and applying open source principles to organizations. It was very nice to feel validated.

Here are some highlights:

• David Berlind and Matt Conner from CNET/ZDNet spent some time on Tuesday interviewing us. That lead to this short blurb, this post on the pain of Javascript across different browsers, and, best of all, this video and post, where David declares that "OpenTeams takes the icky out of wiki." That's definitely going on the web site. David and Tim did a great interview and demo, and Matt did an excellent job editing together a very engaging video of nearly 8 minutes. I had no idea how difficult it is to put together a mixed video of screenshots and talking heads under difficult lighting until I watched Matt do it.
• Michael Sampson blogged on OpenTeams on his laptop right from our booth - listening, watching, and typing all simultaneously.
  
• We got strongly positive feedback from just about everybody who visited our booth. Tim brought his 24" Dell monitor, which made all the difference in the world running our demo video on a continuous loop. It caught a lot of peoples' attention. The exhibitor pavilion was way too noisy for the audio to work at all, but it was still great for us to point to and explain the app. At various points through the conference, people expressed a desire for more demos and less "slideware" - and I think that video on a big screen helped us break through the noise. They could instantly "get it."
  
• In the "very unexpected" category, at one point we were visited by a couple IT people from the US Supreme Court, and they expressed interest in OpenTeams. The idea of constitutional law being debated and shaped on OpenTeams by Supreme Court justices and their clerks makes my head spin. Of course, for security reasons, they're looking for a "behind the firewall" solution, which we'd be more than happy to provide to them. In fact, there was interest from several different people for something like a "Premium Support Enterprise Edition" of OpenTeams, including behind the firewall and integration options. Something we'll definitely be looking into if there's demand.
• While we were there, a couple more blog posts on OpenTeams popped up: Bonj and Webtribution, titled "Wiki + Outlook = OpenTeams Collaborative Innovation", with some very nice quotes:
  

"...what I see from OpenTeams (specifically the UI) blows away most of the competion"

"... if you are even considering a Web 2.0 type collaborative office system give OpenTeams a serious look."

All in all, a great - if exhausting - experience. Now to tackle all the post-conference follow-ups...

Information Week declares OpenTeams one of five Enterprise 2.0 startups to watch

Some very exciting pre-conference buzz for us from Information Week!

Five Enterprise 2.0 Startups To Watch
To differentiate their products from companies like Microsoft and IBM, they'll have to do things differently.

By J. Nicholas Hoover InformationWeek
Jun 14, 2007 11:00 AM

Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 technology taken to the corporate world. Just as in the consumer Web, the goals of Enterprise 2.0 technologies are better collaboration, easier information management, and more personalized productivity.

And just as in the consumer Web, from mashups to wikis, startups abound. Next week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston (a conference run by InformationWeek parent company CMP Media) will see startups alongside companies like Microsoft and IBM. To differentiate, they'll have to do things differently. Here are five presenting or showing their wares at next week's conference that may meet that challenge.

OpenTeams: OpenTeams claims it has "reinvented" the wiki, and sure enough it's come close with an interface that greets users with a three-pane look and feel reminiscent of Microsoft Outlook. The left-hand pane is a list of topics and colleagues to track, the middle pane lists documents that fall within individual topics or are created by those colleagues, and the right pane shows an individual document. OpenTeams also makes it easier to track changes to the wiki -- something often tough to do without looking at individual page history -- by notifying users of any changes made to a page they've been tracking. Another smartly added feature: integrating related wiki pages into a hierarchical "briefing" or narrative view of an idea or proposal.

OpenTeams in 100 words

The Enterprise 2.0 Expo (see below) asked us for a 100-word company and product description for their web site and printed materials. It was an interesting exercise trying to boil down our essence into 100 words (a word count we somehow managed to hit exactly), which you may find a helpful shorthand for yourself or trying to explain OpenTeams to others.

OpenTeams is web-hosted collaborative software specifically designed to enable the agile, innovative Entrepreneurial Organization. At the business level, in addition to project collaboration, blogging, and knowledge management, it’s an "innovative initiative development environment" where employees collaboratively seed and mature new ideas for additional revenue, productivity, and cost-savings. At the technical level, it reinvents the wiki with an intuitive 3-pane interface similar to email and newsfeed readers, making it far easier for non-technical users to create, organize, and navigate content while transparently tracking changes. This dramatically shrinks the learning curve and ensures adoption while ramping up productivity, payback, and employee engagement.

OpenTeams attending Enterprise 2.0 Expo in Boston, June 19-21

Just wanted to let everyone know we are a last-minute exhibitor addition to the Enterprise 2.0 Collaborative Technologies Conference in Boston from Tuesday June 19 through the 21st. We'll have a booth (really a "pod") in the Demo Pavilion, which is open parts of Tuesday and Wednesday. We'll be in pod 62, very easy to find right next to the demo theater. If you'll be in Boston, hope you drop by to see us.

Enterprise 2.0 2007

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference helps forward-thinking IT and business professionals understand how technologies such as conferencing, social software, shared workspaces, enterprise search, presence, unified communications and VoIP can give their organizations a competitive advantage. The program addresses new technologies, the infrastructure required to support them, the cultural changes that must accompany them and how to craft a strategy to make it all happen. Enterprise 2.0 2007 will be held June 18 – 21, 2007 in Boston, MA. www.enterprise2conf.com

Getting beyond email for collaboration

Steve Wylie, GM of the Enterprise 2.0 Expo, had a great column in Information Week last week on the impact of Enterprise Web 2.0 inside organizations, titled "Get Ready for Transparency and Collaboration." There's a lot of good stuff here, and it's a great introduction to the whole Enterprise 2.0 concept. After talking about Dr. McAfee's E2.0 definition and SLATES model, he gets into the weaknesses of email as a collaboration tool:

We have become addicted to e-mail in a sort of love-hate relationship. We check our e-mail obsessively yet dread the ceaseless flow of messages to our in-boxes and, of course, the endless spam. We struggle to find relevant information buried in an e-mail or question whether the right people are copied on a thread. E-mail is a closed communication medium that does a poor job of capturing and sharing knowledge, a key ingredient to success in any business and a key feature of Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 tools offer a chance to break our e-mail addiction and our reliance on other Enterprise 1.0 applications. These tools unlock new value in the form of transparent, contextual communication; ease of access to information; and more effective use of data trapped inside applications, on desktops, or embedded in e-mail attachments. They allow us to capture the knowledge and opinions trapped in the minds of our knowledge workers through simple participation. The early adopters of Enterprise 2.0 tools and concepts are finding them both powerful and liberating.

He then goes on to discuss the culture shift required and the challenges. Adoption can take some coaxing, but the benefits are amazing (see the list on our home page), and most people I've spoken to can't imagine trying to go back to email for collaboration after using a powerful E2.0 tool like OpenTeams.

Next wave of tech-driven productivity = Enterprise 2.0

This is an essay I recently wrote for a local publication on the potential benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 movement, especially to boost U.S. productivity from recently lackluster levels. And, of course, OpenTeams is the perfect tool to drive these sorts of benefits in any organization.

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American business is facing a productivity crisis. Last year, U.S. productivity increased an anemic 1.6% – half the 3-4% annual rates of the previous decade, driven by technologies like business process automation and the Internet. Those technologies have reached saturation, and if the next tech wave doesn’t arrive soon, our economic growth and the quality-of-life improvements it affords will suffer.

This crisis is particularly acute in Houston, where the new energy boom has run up against a tight labor market, and talent constraints prevent companies from fully seizing new opportunities. The renewed focus is productivity: how can we get more out of our organization? Especially when it comes to what McKinsey calls “tacit interactions” – complex collaborative problem-solving – the type of work that has traditionally been resistant to productivity-increasing technological process automation like manufacturing and many services.

Almost everyone feels the primary symptom of this failure: email overload. Collaboration is more important than ever, but email is showing its inadequacy to the task, with overflowing inboxes, the spiraling “Cc: CYA” problem, out-of-sync file attachments, and the lack of any organized, up-to-date, persistent, transparent institutional memory or knowledgebase.

The technological answer is slowly migrating over from the consumer side of the Internet, collectively known as “Web 2.0”. If “Web 1.0” was static web sites, “Web 2.0” is all about interactivity and communities: blogs (short, frequent, easy publishing), tags (community-driven categorization of information), social networking (like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn), and wikis (web-sites easily editable by anyone, such as Wikipedia, the rapidly growing global encyclopedia).

The application of these Web 2.0 technologies in businesses has been termed, naturally, “Enterprise 2.0”. Dr. Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School defines Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.” He further clarifies two key words in that definition:

1. “Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.” (as opposed to email)
2. “Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.” (like with tags or links; and freeform, as opposed to process-oriented workflow, traditional pre-structured knowledge management software, or narrow project-oriented groupware)

These technologies are just starting to be piloted inside companies, but the impact can be dramatic. Some groups using wikis for collaboration have reported email reductions of one-third, meetings and conference calls cut by half, project cycles accelerated by 25%, and even an overall doubling of group productivity. These results make Enterprise 2.0 a prime candidate for the next great tech-driven productivity boom, finally “cracking the code” on accelerating and improving tacit interactions.

The benefits go beyond productivity, impacting areas like innovation, knowledge management, and telework.

In a globalizing economy of fierce competition, commoditization, and cost pressures, innovation has become the new mantra to stay ahead of China and India. And not just product innovation, but bottom-up innovation in processes, costs, service, quality, speed, sales, supply chains, and even business models. Enterprise 2.0 tools create the perfect incubator environment for ad hoc global teams to collaborate on innovative ideas.

In addition to increasing productivity and fostering innovation, Enterprise 2.0 tools are even reviving the field of knowledge management from a decade of high-profile failure (“Knowledge Management 2.0,” anyone?). The lack of incentives and rapidly stale information hobbled such efforts in the past, but because tools like blogs and wikis are integrated into daily work, they overcome these problems and emerge into the “collective intelligence” knowledgebase companies always knew they wanted, but couldn’t quite achieve.

Finally, Enterprise 2.0 software is a great enabler of telework by our newly virtual workforce, whether on the road “living out of a laptop” or working from home. Today companies like Sun and Agilent report that their virtual workforces are 60% less expensive while being 15% more productive. Some experts believe we are at a “tipping point” in the rise of this phenomena, and 40% of the workforce may work this way by 2012.

Collaboration. Productivity. Innovation. Knowledge management. Telework. The benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 movement are both broad and deep, enabling the flexible, adaptive corporation of the 21st century. Make sure yours doesn’t get left behind.

Hinchcliffe on Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst

Dion Hinchcliffe writes and Enterprise 2.0 blog I follow closely, and he recently posted on corporate culture changes driven by Web 2.0 technologies - obviously an exact fit with OpenTeams driving the Entrepreneurial Organization. Some relevant excerpts:

Those of you tracking the Enterprise 2.0 story know the drill, namely that applying Web 2.0 tools and platforms inside organization may or may not — depending on who you are talking to — improve the way we collaborate, run our businesses, and even potentially tap major new veins of previously unexploitable worker productivity. (I have a future post on this)
...
Clearly the exciting things happening on the Web today from the explosion of user-generated content, ad hoc collaboration in the large, rapid self-service global information discovery via Web search, and collective intelligence stories like Wikipedia are outcomes that many would like to replicate inside our enterprises.
...
Because they are highly democratic and egalatarian; anyone can deploy these tools, anyone can quickly learn to use and benefit from them, and they can be used to communicate and collaborate openly with anyone else inside (and often outside) the organization, are inherently viral, they literally tear down the barriers that would normally impede their forward movement and adoption inside the organization.

And, anecdotally at least, this seems to be happening. I now routinely collect stories of firms large and small encountering these tools sprouting up within their organization, both via internally installation of these platform to employees just putting their favorite externally hosted Enterprise 2.0 tool subscription on their corporate credit card. In other words, because they appear to so easily cross organizational boundaries, can be adopted so easily, require virtually no training, are highly social, and so on, Enterprise 2.0 apps appear to have their very own "change agent" by their fundamental nature.

But what I really liked most was his graphic, which hits a lot of the concepts and keywords we built OpenTeams around:
(Blogger sometimes fuzzs up the graphics - click it to see a sharper version)

OpenTeams as a fourth sector "for-benefit" corporation

The New York Times recently had an article exploring a new "fourth sector" of organizations besides the usual business, nonprofit, and government - what they call "for-benefit" corporations that have a nonprofit type of social mission, but are organized as for-profits for flexibility (because nonprofits are tightly regulated in what they can do).

This is the model I've always wanted for OpenTeams, but I didn't know there were so many others trying to do something similar, or that they had such a name/label. I specifically founded OpenTeams because I've seen so much dysfunction in so many organizations, and I felt software was the best way to promote The Entrepreneurial Organization alternative to really liberate peoples' talent and potential. A more traditional route would have been to earn a Ph.D. in business, write a book, and then start a consulting practice - a la Hammer & Champy, Christensen, or Collins fame (Reengineering the Corporation, Innovator's Dilemma, and Good to Great, respectively). I believe web-based software-as-a-service can facilitate more change more quickly than a book and some consulting.

Here are some excerpts from the article that caught my eye:

“I think what people are increasingly looking for, whether in the for-profit or nonprofit sector, is how you harness the vitality and promise of capitalism in a way that’s more fair to everyone,”...

“There’s a big movement out there that is not yet recognized as a movement,” said R. Todd Johnson, a lawyer in San Francisco who is working to create an online wiki to engage in the give and take of information for what he calls “for-benefit
corporations,” another name for fourth-sector activities.

Consumers, employees, managers and — perhaps most important — investors are driving the phenomenon.

“Young M.B.A. students are not satisfied with going to work for a normal corporation because they are passionate to do good in the world and do it in business,” Mr. Johnson said...

Still, whatever participants call it, the fourth sector faces challenges. Current legal and tax structures draw strict lines between for-profits and nonprofits, and fiduciary obligations prevent asset managers from making investments with any aim other than maximizing profit. The social benefits that fourth sector firms seek to unlock are not easily quantified and often take decades, not quarters, to attain.

“You run into fundamental problems in trying to grow good because neither for-profit nor nonprofit is set up to do what new entrepreneurs and others are trying to do — namely, harness the power of private enterprise to create social benefit,” ...

“Companies like us have no conventional road map to follow in building our businesses and thus are greeted with a lot of skepticism,” (check!)

The article goes on to give examples of some organizations, and talks about the many complications, especially financing. It's definitely worth reading the whole thing. But even with the obstacles, it still felt good to find out there are others with similar aspirations to mine.

Customer testimonial

Today's post is a testimonial from one of our private beta testers, Dr. Chris Bronk at Rice University, which just goes to show that OpenTeams is a broadly applicable collaboration tool, not just for corporations or Entrepreneurial Organizations:

Starting a new research program from scratch at Rice University's Baker Institute came with many challenges, but unexpected were the difficulty in finding physical space to house my three student researchers. Fortunately students come equipped with laptops these days, so we agreed to skip office space and work wherever wifi went. With one running Linux, another a Mac and the last a Windows die-hard, this soon led to a document nightmare and email overload.

With hectic schedules and my students' propensity to work at times when most other people are asleep, a collaboration suite was in need. Having held the "collaboration guru" portfolio in my job at the U.S. State Department's Office of eDiplomacy, I thought I had a solution in the bag, but was stymied by each new collaborator's computing preferences and the problem of client installations, licensing and all of the other administrative overhead I loath. I returned to my three rules of collaboration: (1) No client installation/browser only; (2) Minimal learning curve and administrative overhead; and (3) Cheap, i.e. no big upfront investments in servers or software.

Open Teams hit the mark on all three, and most impressively, ran reliably during beta. While the students probably got tired of me repeating "Put it in Open Teams!" I now have all of their work for the semester in one location and can bring new team members aboard able to see from day one where things started and access our team's knowledge repository: versioned, time-stamped and attributed.

Chris Bronk, Ph.D.
Fellow, Technology, Society & Public Policy
Baker Institute | Rice University

Our first review!

There was a spike in traffic to the blog yesterday, and a bunch of new users. A little investigating uncovered a great review of OpenTeams by Mike Gunderloy on the Web Worker Daily blog. A few of my favorite excerpts:

Web Worker Daily - OpenTeams Offers Wikis With Structure

With their tagline of “work doesn’t have to suck” how can you not want to like OpenTeams? This new entrant in the Ajax application space has taken an idea that will already be familiar to most web workers - the now-venerable wiki - and reinvented with a more structured, drag-and-drop user interface.
...
The traditional wiki makes good sense to the sort of person who is at home with the command line, but I’ve heard the same objections over and over again from people whose main job does not revolve around technology:

• You want me to edit this markup soup?
• How do I tell what’s new?
• How can I find anything in this mess?

OpenTeams addresses these objections by wrapping a GUI around the wiki. Individual wiki pages are still there, but they’re pushed into the right-hand pane of a three-pane user interface, and edited through a rich text interface instead of via a markup language.
...
For distributed teams that include non-programmers working on projects with a lot of moving parts it looks worth a serious evaluation.

By all means, please read the whole thing, which includes more details about how OpenTeams works, and a nice screenshot.