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.

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.

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.

An overview vision for the Entrepreneurial Organization

Our launch press release last week contained a high-level vision for the Entrepreneurial Organization. I added a couple permanent links to it in the right-side column, but thought I should go ahead and mention it in an official post. I made it two links to the same thing so people could find it whether they're looking for the launch press release or a description of the vision.

You may have seen a "rated-G" edited version of the press release, which Business Wire required us to substitute so as not to offend any sensitive journalists with the word "sucks". It, unfortunately, lost a lot of its punch in the process. Fortunately, they did allow us to release the original "rated-PG" version on their EON site, where it should permanently reside - and that's the one we're linking to.

Over time on this blog, I expect to try and flesh out more of the details of the Entrepreneurial Organization behind the vision.

Work doesn’t have to suck

That, in a rather blunt nutshell, describes our mission at OpenTeams. Surveys say up to 70% (!) of workers are burned-out and disengaged at work. Most are looking for a new job. How many happy colleagues do you know? I’ll bet a whole lot fewer than the unhappy ones. Something’s wrong with the way we run our organizations. Wasted talent and potential on a staggering scale.

Startups are a noticeable exception though. Almost everybody seems engaged and excited at a startup. Is it possible to bring that innovative and entrepreneurial culture to larger organizations? Google seems to have done it (they have thousands of employees now), but are they a new model or just an odd anomaly?

We believe it can be done, and the right collaborative software can drive that cultural transformation. OpenTeams is an experiment in translating this vision into software that propels real, practical change throughout organizations to be more innovative, entrepreneurial, and empowering for all employees. All the Web/Enterprise 2.0 excitement is an indicator we’re at a “technological tipping point” that could fundamentally revolutionize how people work together.

We do have a starting framework we’re working from - what we academically call The Open Model Entrepreneurial Organization (OMEO), or really just The Entrepreneurial Organization for short. We’ll explore that framework in this blog, as well as discuss tips, lessons learned, and best practices from both our members and our own internal experiences.

We’re looking for a few pioneering leaders to help shape that vision and the software to make it happen – an authentic community that’s as dissatisfied with the status quo as we are (if Dilbert hits a little too close to home, then you qualify). To that end, all OpenTeams users are automatically granted access to the OpenTeams User Community space, where we’re very interested to hear your feedback, experiences, and ideas.

It’ll be quite the adventure. Hope to have you along for the ride.
Warmest regards,
-Tory Gattis
OpenTeams Founder and Social Systems Architect