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Andrew McAfee

All Their Base are Belong to UsYesterday

Under the auspices of the Management Lab I'm getting together later this week with a group of very sharp people who think about companies and how to change and improve them. We have a pretty specific agenda: to come up with the set of experiments we want to run on corporate guinea pigs. The MLab's mission is to provide such guinea pigs by putting us in contact with companies whose leaders have both the curiosity required to allow experiments and the clout required to get them up and running. So our sessions this week should be great fun; I'm looking forward to brainstorming with my colleagues about how to tweak organizations and watch what happens.

I'll be concentrating on technology (duh) and working to design IT-enabled interventions. I'll be particularly eager to design them around Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches, and to address questions like:

• Does a salesforce that uses Twitter outperform one that doesn't?
• What happens when you start

Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?September 23

Imagine that an organization has deployed a full suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) for its members— blogs, wikis, discussion / Q&A forums, upload facilities for photos and videos and etc., Digg-like utilities to flag and vote on digital content, prediction markets, some kind of enterprise Twitter, and whatever else a ‘full suite’ consists of, now or in the future. And imagine further that the leaders of the organization are sincerely interested in pursuing Enterprise 2.0 and getting their people to actually use the new tools. What would they then do? What would be their smart course(s) of action?

Virtually everyone agrees that coaching, training, explaining, and leading by example would be appropriate and beneficial activities. But what about measuring? It’s a technical no-brainer to measure how much each individual has contributed and to generate some kind of absolute or relative metric. Would doing so be helpful or harmful? Would it lead to negative outcomes and perverse behaviors, or would measuring E2.0 contributions stimulate and encourage the right kinds of actions? 

These are fundamental questions, and they touch both on uncharted territory (ESSPs are new, after all) and on longstanding debates about motivations, incentives, and the interplay between them. It’ll likely take a few posts to cover all this territory, so consider this the first in a series of posts about the utilit

What Happens When You Treat a Nerd Like Proust?September 12

The Boston-based Internet inbound marketing company Hubspot recently started its own version of Vanity Fair's Proust questionnaire (which was evidently inspired by the answers Marcel Proust gave to party questionnaires when he was 13 and 20). They asked me to complete it a little while ago and I jumped at the chance to pay back CEO Brian Halligan, who spoke to my MBA class and invited me to a Sox game this summer.

I liked the questions very much, and hope I did them justice. My responses have just been posted on Hubspot's web site. Check them out if you're interested, and leave a comment there or here to let us know what you think.

Eurolag?September 8

I’ve spent the past couple days at the Talk the Future conference in Krems, Austria. I was not suprised that it was well organized, but was pleasantly surprised at how well attended it was. There seems to be sincere interest in today’s technology-enabled business opportunities and challenges. I was asked excellent questions during my talk on Enterprise 2.0— ones that reflected a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities brought by emergent social software platforms.

Everyone I talked to at the conference, however, told me that European businesses were lagging American ones in the deployment and use of these new tools. Most of the attendees were from German-speaking countries so I wasn’t hearing voices from throughout the continent, but the ones I did hear were saying that both Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 were gaining steam, but were not as far along as they were in the States.

I didn’t get the idea that these people were just being modest and polite to an American guest. Instead, they sincerely believed that their businesses were behind in this area. I give their opinions a fair amount of weight because many of them worked for or with US-based companies, and so had points of comparison.

So the question is why is this the ca

Who Cares What You Think?September 2

I was talking about Enterprise 2.0 with a small group of senior healthcare executives a little while back, and one of them brought up a very interesting and insightful point. We were discussing the right way to encourage participation and contribution in emergent social software platforms, and I told the story of the Intellipedia shovel (which is described in some detail in Intellipedia's Wikipedia article ).

It's a plastic shovel sent by Intellipedia central to the boss of a particularly active contributor, along with a request to present it to the contributor.  All members of the military, for example, have access to the secret-level version of Intellipedia, and periodically Intellipedia HQ notices that a low-ranking serviceman or -woman stationed in a hot spot far from home has been making a huge number of edits. HQ then sends a shovel, a citation, and a letter of explanation off to an officer as high up the chain of command as possible, requesting that the officer present the shovel to the prolific editor as a way of saying "job well done."  It turns out that officers are usually more than happy to make a little ceremony out of the shovel presentation, that the whole affair is good marketing for Intellipedia and mar