The Bossless Organization wins the M-Prize!

Way back in May, I submitted the Bossless Organization concept to the Management Innovation eXchange community as an entry in their M-Prize contest.  The community was founded by Gary Hamel - ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the world's most influential management thinker - to pioneer Management 2.0.  Last night I received notification that I was one of six winners out of hundreds of submissions:

I'm so pleased to inform you that you've won an M-Prize for the Hack you contributed to the MIX:  The Bossless Organization: From Bosses to Mentor Investors

We combed through hundreds of contributions from MIXers from around the world and from every kind of organization—looking for boldness, originality, thoroughness, and the ability to inspire and instruct in equal measure. We certainly found those qualities in your contribution!

The official announcement of the winners is tomorrow morning (10am EST). The McKinsey Quarterly will publish an article about the M-Prize and will send an alert to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. We'll celebrate you and your fellow winners on the MIX home page, M-Prize page and in a series of blog posts from me and Gary Hamel. You'll also receive recognition on the MIX and the Quarterly's Facebook and Twitter streams and in a variety of our partner's forums (from the Wall Street Journal to opensource.com). We'll keep you posted as these announcements go live. And, of course, you are now a lucky ticket holder for the 2011 World Innovation Forum.

Judges for the M-Prize included CEOs and thought leaders such as Harvard professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George, W.L Gore's CEO Terri Kelly, Whole Foods' Founder and CEO John Mackey, "Future of Work" MIT professor Tom Malone, and venture capitalist Leighton Read.  I'd say that's quite a list of endorsements!

You can read an extended blog post about the contest and the winners here: "Announcing the M-Prize Winners: Audacity, Imagination, Experimentation"

I have to say I was surprised and stunned to receive such an honor.  It is an incredibly exciting development, and one that I hope acts as a spark to get more organizations to experiment with management 2.0 concepts, including the Bossless Organization.  If the concept is something of interest to you, please drop me a line (tgattis (at) openteams.com), most especially if you might consider trying it inside your own organization.

Update: The McKinsey Quarterly has published their article on the M-Prize winners here, including a sidebar on the Bossless Organization.

Update 2: Gary Hamel summarizes the Bossless Organization in the Wall Street Journal here.  See the second item.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.