SO LET’S GET this straight from the start: I meet all the stereotypes of someone who has dedicated his entire career to IT. (Location 84)
Note: goeie binnenkomer
The technologists among us would say that the ever-accelerating trends of mobile, cloud, big data and social are transforming the IT landscape. Most of us would simply say that we live in a period where technology has become a normal, necessary part of our everyday lives. But over the past few years a nagging sense of doubt has entered my mind about all this. I have begun to question the truth of the utopian vision of technology as the ultimate liberator. Like some people, I’ve been beginning to wonder whether the very thing that was supposed to set us free might not have instead ensnared us – without truly adding the value it promised. Because there seems to be one area where technology fundamentally hasn’t changed things. Work. (Location 96)
Note: fijne flow
Today we are living with the legacy of a couple of hundred or so years of office work. We have gone from working pretty much for ourselves (or the local lord) as farm workers and labourers, through the factories of the industrial revolution to working for big business with the rise of modern multinational corporations. And somewhere along the way, the way we work got stuck. We have found ourselves at the mercy of command-and-control hierarchies, butting up against principles that were designed for an analogue world and which have become more or less irrelevant in today’s digital, connected world. (Location 112)
Note: Stuck
Today we still reward work done in terms of time – hours worked. This owes itself to the industrial drive for business efficiency through standardisation: the production-line model of work where people perform a repetitive task or set of tasks contributing to an outcome or product, rather than creating an outcome or product themselves. This was the only way you could have scale. It was also the only way that you could make big, important things like steam trains or omnibuses. This was a definite shift from the artisanal model of earlier times. What was being rewarded in this new way of work was not the outcome – an artefact sold at market – but hours spent on tasks. Workers received salaries for a working week based on clocking in and out. Companies focused on reducing the cost of labour and increasing the standardisation, all to improve the cost-efficiency and reliability of their manufacturing processes. And so people became directly compensated for the process not the outcome of their work. This shift was very important. It didn’t go away overnight. In fact, most of us are still living with it today. (Location 124)
For a while this disconnect was probably harmless enough. After all, products were being made, services were being offered, and many companies became wildly successful. But the levels of disengagement felt by the average knowledge worker today, and revealed in the studies earlier, should set alarm bells ringing. Put simply: in a world where the reasons for swarming, standardisation and relentless focus on process are disappearing thanks to technology, continuing to organise our work around these principles is driving the majority of employees quietly mad. (Location 141)
What we have lost in all of this is the fact that we are all, for the most part, professional, independent creative beings, employed by our firms to help them achieve great outcomes. (Location 146)
Technology visionary Ben Hammersley describes this problem best when he refers to the ‘hyper adrenalized’ state of most open-plan workers. When placed in open-plan offices, argues Hammersley, we become like antelope on the savannah, spending most of our time feeling vulnerable to the wide open nature of our habitat. (Location 161)
Our centralised environments have effectively become cognitive wastelands, where flair and innovation are lost to the daily battle with outdated processes and forms of communication. (Location 172)
The modern day curse of email is a superb example of this insanity where productivity or process replaces creativity or work. It’s also a great reminder of what happens when an outdated process (not email per se, but email for everything) is kept alive by successive waves of technology that enable its use to be both prolonged and perverted until the potential value it offers has been lost. (Location 174)
Our inboxes are full of communications that should have been sent through more appropriate means or should never have been sent at all. (Location 196)
There are several reasons why QWERTY still rules supreme – standardisation being one of the most powerful – but the basic underlying cause is simply human inertia. In other words, we like what we know and we know what we like. The subtext to this is incredibly important, especially for those of us in the technology industry. It means that in all the challenges facing an unreformed and unproductive working world, technology itself is in many respects the least of those challenges. If you cannot help people to change, technology changing all around them won’t make the slightest difference. (Location 222)
Productivity is in danger of becoming the curse of the modern day workplace. We have become transfixed by improving productivity to such an extent that we are starting to forget the other attributes that most people bring to their organisations every single day. We spend our working days locked to a single period of time and a single physical location, batting communications back and forward in a sort of nightmarish game of digital ping-pong. Success is defined by the number of individual processes we complete not the outcomes of the organisation. The massive risk here is that in a world defined by its processes and not its outcomes, working smarter is not an option and the only feasible alternative is simply to work harder. This, in a nutshell, is the core of why I think work isn’t working. (Location 231)
How creativity works Psychology helps us understand what we need to do to promote this new level of creative connectivity. As business psychologist Tony Crabbe points out, creativity tends to divide into three general categories of activity: 1. intellectual ambling 2. connecting brains 3. deep thinking. (Location 248)
Intellectual ambling is a solitary activity where the brain is allowed to wander, ruminate and explore. Fundamentally, the brain is a connection-making machine. (Location 253)
Any new learning or creative insight occurs when a new pattern of connections is made. However, it is easy to stop these connections from happening. Think of a time when you were trying to solve a really difficult problem, or come up with a great idea. Often we get the feeling we are not far from our solution. What’s happening at that point is the brain is grasping, straining to hear the weak signals from distant synapses. In fact, vision is such a dominant sense, when we are close to an insight, the brain floods the visual cortex with alpha waves to shut it up so it can focus on making the connection. This means that, for about 0.3 of a second before we have an insight, we tend to go blind! (Location 254)
Our current workplaces, which prioritise activity over thought, reaction over reflection make intellectual ambling counter-cultural. Even more significantly, the noise and distractions make listening for insights extremely difficult: either from the chaos of meeting after meeting, or the incessant flow of email after email, or the office chatter going on around us. We have effectively created insight-preventing workspaces. (Location 259)
The problem is we surround ourselves by like-minded people working on similar problems. Where possible, we need to broaden and extend the cognitive gene pool of our organisations. We are less likely to make new discoveries or to discover truly disruptive innovation when we are stuck in open-plan teams or organisational pods of people who are more or less doing exactly the same kind of work as us and see the world in exactly the same way. (Location 268)
If the intent is to generate some genuinely new thinking, it is going to happen much less often with people who see the world the same way as you. (Location 271)
Deep thinking might not sound the most “creative” type of approach; it is more grunt than flair, where solutions are ground out through concerted intellectual effort. Deep thinking needs time and focus. The problem here is establishing both the time and the environment that even allows deep thinking to take place. According to experts, it takes the average human around 15 minutes to achieve “flow state” thinking, the place where our cognitive powers are at their most powerful. Yet the chances of finding 15 contiguous minutes in our current working environments without interruption from meetings, emails or other distractions are so rare that we are unlikely to ever harness this incredible power. Multi-tasking has become the order of the day for all employees, and yet studies have increasingly proved that focusing on multiple tasks simultaneously makes us 30% less effective than if we focus on each one in turn. (Location 273)
At its core, genuine flexible working is pretty simple. It just means being thoughtful about the tasks you have to achieve each day and choosing the most appropriate location from which to accomplish them. This is where the transformation happens, where work no longer is defined by a specific location, but instead is simply an activity, something you do. Flexible working is about being able to be effective regardless of your location; whether that’s at home, in the airport, on the train, in a café, or at a specially designed drop-in office. It’s also about being effective because of your location. (Location 321)
To realise the full potential that flexible working can bring, industry and government need to invest in creating “third spaces” that allow people to meet and be productive without crowding onto train platforms at half past seven in the morning. There is a huge opportunity to make better use of our high streets, empty shops, moribund pubs, libraries and other community sites, reinventing them as places that let workers plug in, connect and collaborate. (Location 328)
Moving people around en masse every single working day feels like an outdated 20th century approach to a task that could be easily bettered by 21st century thinking. Notwithstanding the huge environmental benefits, flexible working should also mean that we spend more time (and money) in our local communities, thereby shifting resources back towards smaller cities, towns and villages. Of course, we will still need to travel. We will still visit the central hubs of business and commerce in our regions. But the point is we should visit them less. We should have a choice. We should reap the rewards when we use them, rather than using them by default. (Location 334)
flexible working represents a way of working that goes far beyond traditional remote-working and embraces new work styles. It is designed to encourage organisations to free their people to work in the ways which allow them to be most productive. It is part of the much-needed shift towards measuring employees by outputs not inputs. (Location 340)
Of course, in exploring the potential that technology affords it’s incredibly easy (and dangerous) to jump to extremes. Flexible working does not mean that it’s fine for people to work permanently in isolation. After all, the best ideas are often a cumulative effort, spawned by shared thoughts and multiple opinions. So it is crucial that employees are able to match tasks to environments and environments to people. (Location 343)
Sometimes the only way to break through barriers to reach true innovation is to bump up against people who don’t understand the context. (Location 347)
It isn’t that bosses fear their staff are putting their feet up at home. It’s that employees are terrified that their bosses or fellow workers will think they are. Why? Because that’s what they think of others. (Location 359)
An Ipsos MORI study on flexible working highlights some of the other eminently human anxieties getting in the way. They found that individuals working away from the office feel under pressure to overcompensate for their absence. (Location 366)
So even when flexible working is in place, it can be quite as destructive as the most regimented, process-driven, anxiety-filled open-plan office. Without a deeper cultural change, in fact, it’s useless. (Location 370)
Too often, flexible working is brought in on an individual basis. It’s an ad-hoc measure. (Location 387)
Flexible working should be seen by organisations as a strategic operational objective. It is not so much about accommodating employees (though that’s great). It’s actually about unlocking their full potential. And it’s one of the most significant things any business can do to improve its long-term success. (Location 395)
The reason authentic flexible working is so transformative is that companies which take a comprehensive approach to flexible working have to re-orient their entire way of working around this new model. (Location 400)
Organisations that adopt this strategic approach to flexible working will stand a greater chance of success not just because they have changed their culture and objectives to ones that unlock and reward the natural entrepreneurialism of their employees. They will also have addressed the key issue of trust. (Location 403)
If employees are instead empowered to work flexibly in order to contribute to the overall success of the organisation, they assume far greater responsibility in their role (and the roles of their co-workers) and the issue of trust all but disappears. (Location 409)
‘What you need is somebody with a big brain, somebody who knows everything about everything. The reality is those people don’t exist. But through things like social networking, you can create a virtual big brain. In other words, out there in the organisation there is probably somebody that knows about the problem you have. All you’ve got to do is find a way of connecting the person who has the problem with the person who knows the answer. Social networking is exactly that platform.’ (Location 431)
The first thing to understand is that being a social business is not about how well you “do” social to bridge the relationship between your organisation and your customers. In other words, it’s not about how helpful your tweets are (though naturally I hope they are helpful). That should be to your business as breathing is to a human being. It’s just a basic function you need to perform to survive – and thankfully one that has been written about at length in many other places. The proper definition of social business is much, much more. It is, like Richard and Merlin have found, a way of going beyond how your firm currently works. It’s a way of fundamentally changing the way you do business. It’s got nothing to do with incremental advances – “doing the same stuff a bit better”. Instead it’s all about the scary, white-knuckle, leap-of-faith sort of transformation that generates true change and new opportunities. (Location 447)
A social business is one that recognises that its greatest value is how its people are connected to each other and how in turn they are connected to the people they serve inside and outside the business. It’s one that truly recognises the value of simply bringing people together and giving them an outcome you want them to achieve. (Location 457)
Most importantly, for this chapter’s focus, it means that every single employee and every single customer has both a voice and a direct line with those who can affect real change in a business’s services or products. (Location 467)
Until now, if you wanted to interact with a business you would have to work your way through the customer services department, or the hierarchy of the part of the business you were dealing with. Today, you can get directly to the individual responsible for what you are interested in. (Location 476)
You ask your employees to help you solve a problem, you get them aligned – and it turns out they’re a lot more effective and engaged. (Location 501)
Adding another communication channel does not itself make your business more effective. (Location 512)
Social business initiatives usually fail for a few simple reasons: 1. Social collaboration is disruptive by its very nature. It tramples over organisational boundaries, corporate status and the sort of stale business etiquette that has been around for decades. It cannot be adopted in isolation – it represents, and therefore requires, a significant cultural change, not just in individuals but across the entirety of an organisation. Just like the problem of flexible working being thought about in the context of specific individuals rather than for the benefit of an entire business, many social business projects are adopted only within teams or departments, leaving the rest of the organisation untouched. Even when implemented company-wide, social is often implemented in isolation, or alongside other existing processes. As a result the benefit is not just lost; the disruption impacts negatively on the entire organisation, and as a result the project is usually pulled or simply left to quietly die. 2. The technology that provides the means for such social collaboration is frequently outside of the traditional corporate or enterprise IT suite of tools. As a result, it is often deemed to be unsuitable for use. The irony is that in most cases it is the business that is driving the need for social collaboration and the challenge is to help the IT department to evolve from their old approach, formed over the past 30 years, and to relinquish control. IT departments have often worked hard to establish safety and structure. Enabling collaboration to flow fast and free can feel counter to that. Nevertheless, the recent trend of the consumerisation of IT, led by a new wave of devices and a much richer personal experience, has set the precedent. As we’ll see shortly, this is but the beginning – IT departments and the businesses they serve are going to have to seek a happy medium where the evolving, dynamic needs of the business can be matched by the cost-effective deployment and management of its IT services. 3. Finally, and most significantly, it comes down to the risk of democratisation. Concerns will be felt at all levels about the risk of people using social tools inappropriately. And it’s the tools, more than the people, that will be doubted. Yet while flattened hierarchies and fluid collaboration present risks, these risks remain fundamentally in the hands of the individuals that use them. If you can’t trust employees with these tools, you can hardly trust them without them. We see this debate play out every day in our newspapers, where journalists decry the abuse of technology and usually end up with a call to ban or switch off the technology. In the face of the cultural change needed to minimise the risks of a social business, many firms shy away. It feels safer to hide behind familiar technology and processes. But while it may be easier, it is never safer. (Location 548)
‘We had to change our structure, to become a network. We were required to react quickly. Instead of decisions being made by people who were more senior – the assumption that senior meant wiser – we found that the wisest decisions were usually made by those closest to the problem.’ (Location 635)
‘In a world where what matters is predictability and efficiency, you don’t want your employees to take it upon themselves to be innovative or creative. You want them executing specific, job-oriented tasks. (Location 718)
‘As broadband internet became a part of our lives, customers wanted that value delivered in a different way. People wanted to download or stream movies because it was a better and easier way of watching movies at home. But Blockbuster was blind to this changing demand. They’d begun to confuse the value they provided with how they provided it. Because of that, they couldn’t adapt. (Location 744)
‘People often think businesses get disrupted because they don’t improve. But Blockbuster actually improved rapidly. They eliminated late fees, which was ground-breaking at the time. They expanded the potential for a home cinema experience by offering food. They came up with all sorts of ways to improve the value they offered. But none of it mattered, because they’d gotten it wrong. They weren’t actually improving the value that they truly offered: watching movies at home. They were improving a particular delivery mechanism for that value. They were improving a way of providing value. It wasn’t good enough.’ (Location 747)
In order to avoid a colossal mistake like Blockbuster’s, business leaders must have the confidence to let go of the command and controls. Fortunately, this isn’t as frightening as it sounds. Autonomy actually becomes an intrinsic motivator for the employee – they feel trusted with freedom, empowered to be creative and to innovate. (Location 752)
In this world the role of the manager also changes – they are no longer the definer of process, the hander out of minute-by-minute instructions. In this new scenario, it is simply their job to: •make sure that everybody’s aligned on the company’s mission (Location 754)
‘My job as a leader is to create alignment so people understand the direction we’re going. But everyone at the company has to have autonomy for us to work at this pace. They may do things differently than I would have done it, but that’s okay – as long as the output is good.’ (Location 781)
If we want to reap the benefits of the reimagined business, we need to equip the future workforce with the cognitive skills that will ensure their success. This really means teaching them about skills not tools. (Location 814)
‘It turns out that if you begin to take away bureaucracy, trust is the currency you use. You exchange bureaucracy for trust. And trust is a currency that can actually drive agility.’ – Adam Pisoni, yammer (Location 820)
‘Engaged employees plan to stay for what they give. The disengaged stay for what they get.’ (Location 830)
