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The Social Organization

This blog is about how social media is changing organizations.

The Alignment Gap Between Organizational Structure & Organizational PrioritiesDecember 9 2008

Large companies have necessarily needed a functional structure in order to manage the vast number of people they employ. Somewhere it was decided that any one individual cannot be responsible for more than 7-10 direct reports...and consequently you get functional hierarchies.

The big issue? Whether functions are determined by job type(engineering, sales, etc.) or by market segment (consumer, channel, etc.), corporate priorities and initiatives typically cross function. That may not seem so bad, except that each functional head understands the priorities just a little bit differently. One function may see the number 1 priority as 10x more important than the number 2 priority while their colleague may see them as roughly equal in importance.  That has huge implications on how many and which resources get assigned to different initiatives.  Below is my simplistic graphic of this problem:

You can see where an organization may start to go horribly wrong.  Whatever initiative that is #2 may cause huge engineering and services issues because while marketing and sales ramped up investments...the company isn't staffed appropriately to deliver.  On the #3 priority, the company may be making huge investments in something but if marketing and sales are not also making investments, the initiative will fall flat and ultimately not succeed.  Yet many companies do not hire business owners for their initiatives and priorities (instead they tend

Give a Community Gift for the HolidaysNovember 28 2008

As an adult I’ve always had a conflicted relationship with gifts. Interestingly I enjoy giving rather than receiving but not because I dislike getting attention…it’s really more of that I get a lot of presents that I have no idea what to do with. That may make me sound unappreciative but that’s not it – I am honored  that I have friends and family who want to show me their affection. But I also really dislike getting bric-brac or tchotchkes because I think that there has to be some better purpose for $10-20.

Here is my husband’s post on Give a Crap. Don’t Give Crap. Here’s How. I second the sentiment and I’ve got some additional ideas, some of which I’ve been trying to practice over the years:

• For a number of years, my mother has given an animal in our name to the Heifer Project and she gives us a small ornament or toy of the animal to put out at Christmas…we’ve got a menagerie at this point and it really makes me feel good. My husband and I took this a step further when we got married and registered at Heifer Project and Changing the Present for our wedding. We felt that changing the lives of people in real need was a much better way to celebrate our happiness than having another vase (we are older so that played a big part in our decision – we have most of the household items we need already). Somewhere there is a herd of llamas helping families in need along with Koester the Pig (named in honor

The Importance of Social Networking to Information WorkNovember 21 2008

Collaboration software was designed for the information worker and it has indeed, helped tremendously by giving people more ways and channels to communicate and work together on content.  However, collaboration - in its more traditional definition - is too limited for what information workers need because it doesn't acknowledge the entire work flow, it typically helps with different points along that process.  What instigates collaboration in the first place?  What is the actionable results from the collaboration?   Who and what are the actors in collaboration and how trustworthy are they?  When are formal processes appropriate and when are more informal processes needed?

I like to think of this information work process as a circular thing, one work flow impacting and influencing others.  The process is sometimes kicked off formally - through perhaps a executive strategy discussion - and other times the process is kicked of by an informal conversation between two colleagues.  To me, the process looks something like - each step informed by the information source:

The other thing about information work that sometimes goes unacknowledged is...if you don't publish, broadcast, and get buy-in you might as well have fell a tree in the middle of Alaska for the amount of impact it will have. So to me information work is not effective

You Can Count Your Money...and You Can Count Your Leads...November 12 2008

...but you can't count on how much money your leads will turn into.  At this morning's Social Media Breakfast the topic was ROI in Social Media. Brian Halligan of HubSpot and Matt Cutler of Visible Measures gave great presentations about how they track social media efforts.  Andrew McAfee, however, dropped a bit of a bombshell in saying that ROI from enterprise software cannot actually be calculated. Not that enterprise software in not valuable mind you...just that its value is too complex to effectively calculate with models.

This was a very interesting line of thinking for me for a variety of reasons. 

First, with the financial meltdown there is a lot of conversation swirling around about whether there was enough good old fashioned experience and intuition governing the big financial firms or whether they had become subserviant to their models which, apparently, told them that lending to people who couldn't pay them back was a good idea.  I'm being a bit cheeky here and I can't begin to know all the factors that led to the crisis but it has started a conversation around the use of models in decision-making and management.

Second, I spent a number of years benchmarking the supply chain and product development performance of Fortune 500 technology companies.  It was a fascinating exercise and from it I brought away two primary lessons.  One, benchmarking can be incredibly useful.  Two, people misuse and misunde

My Twitter ElectionNovember 4 2008

For me, this election has been very different than previous elections.  Yes, there are historic choices to be made and our country is embroiled in crisis.  But I've felt in the past that those conditions were true too.  What's different for me?  Twitter. And for me, it has profoundly changed how this election felt and for me it reinvigorated my faith in the democratic and civil processes we have in the US.

Why?  Instead of feeling talked at and broadcast to and somewhat isolated, I was participating in a national - and indeed international - town hall conversation.  This discussion added a low latency hum to the entire election season but spiked around events such as the conventions and the debates. Red, blue, and purple it was great to be a part of a giant conversation around issues in which we should all be involved.  By having these huge online conversations we all took just a little more responsibility for the issues themselves and that made the election more relevant.

For those of you who know me, you've probably heard my soapbox around the need to teach civics in schools again.  Why?  Because government is not this far away concept that is only there when you need something; it is the rules by which we collectively decide to live.  The FCC controls information transmission. The Department of Agriculture regulates our food supply. The Social Security administration manages retirement benefits.  These are, in effect, the values that we have coll