Sunday Quote : John Hagel
May 12, 2013
Our point of view is that the rationale of scalable efficiency is becoming less and less compelling, and the alternative rationale is scalable learning. The reason we have institutions is because we can learn faster as part of an institution than we could alone.
This quote is taken from a great John Hagel interview by Stowe Boyd. The co-chairman of Deloitte Center for Edge innovation shares here a profound idea.
In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky suggests that the core purpose of organizations, as defined by Nobel prize Ronald Coase, (the cost of transaction) is no longer relevant in our networked economy. In order to demonstrate his statement, Shirky draws on complex distributed projects such as open source software or wikipedia. So this has left us wondering : what is the core purpose of institutions in the 21st century ?
John Hagel proposal is inspiring : it is to scale learning to the whole organization for faster individual learning and (I may add) to develop organization intelligence as the network of individual knowledge. Which brings us back to the Knowing-Doing Gap : once the company has accumulated learning and knowledge, how does it turn it back into action ?
The Collaborative Organization by Jacob Morgan
May 10, 2013
Jacob Morgan is principal at The Chess Media Group and has been a very active promoter of Collaborative Software for the last few years.
I had the opportunity to meet him at a party at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Boston in 2011. I knew his work before that as I’ve read many of the case studies his company has shared through their blog. I was quite impressed by his enthusiasm and his sharp mind on the topic despite his rather young age (he was 28 back then). He told me then he was writing a book : I guess it is the first time I read a book that was introduced to me by his author prior to the publication so please forgive me for bragging about it.
The Collaborative Organization introduces itself as a Strategic guide to solving your internal business challenges using emerging social and collaborative tools. It is a truly useful book as it is clear, actionable, based on solid experience and many research studies. It allows to define a strategy suited to your own context with many tricks of the trade to tactically address the many issues such project implies.
Last but not least, the book contains insights from many thought leaders such as Don Tapscott (already quoted here), Gil Yehuda, Charles H Green, Oscar Berg or Andrew McAfee and, for each section, there is a testimony by a project leader of such initiative in many different industries : insurance, publishing, video game, health care, logistics, government, organisation …
This allows to multiply the perspectives and make it a genuine valuable and collaborative effort …
The Knowing-Doing Gap
May 7, 2013
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton are both professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University and this book, written in the late 90′s, remains as relevant as ever today.
In The Knowing-Doing Gap (How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action) they attempt to address one of the main root cause of the problems organizations face in 21st century economy : why the ideas that are widely known and proven to be useful remain unimplemented ? How to bridge this knowing-doing gap and what are the results of companies succeeding in doing so ? How to tackle the paradox of companies that know too much and do too little, and who fails in transforming knowledge into action (and action back into new knowledge) ?
This is one of the most powerful book I’ve read about management together with Toyota Kata by Mike Rother. Both books have this thing in common : these are proposing meta-processes to address systemic issues faced by companies today. The objective is to align thinking and action and, while doing so, it is to deeply transform organizations into dynamic entities able to tackle any new problem arising.
Another classic reviewed by #hypertextual and another very long post (+2000 words – 10 mns read) …
TS Eliot and the Pyramid of Organisational Knowledge
December 10, 2012
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
This wonderful quote from TS Eliot echoes the DIKW model of Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom. Read the rest of this entry »
PMP Certified !
November 4, 2011
Ladies & Gentlemen, please be warned that I just passed the PMP Certification.
I have been studying the topic during about 6 months and I am quite pleased with the result.
Now, why on earth would an Enterprise 2.0 evangelist and Agile Methodologies practitioner would want to become PMP certified and how did he do it ?
Read on if you have some spare clicks …
 |
This the 2011 edition of #hypertextual presentation on Enterprise 2.0. (Check out French Version)
The original version has enjoyed unexepected success with more than 20,000 views (counting both french and english editions) and the honor of being ranked amongst the 10 great Enterprise 2.0 presentation for 2010 by CRM Expert Harish Kotadia.
How the social web is transforming the way we work in the 21st century is an endless source of fascination for me. This new edition tries to be more practical and focusses on the abilities of social software to create value in the knowledge economy.
The objective, as always, is to try and answer the 10 questions for organisations in an inter-connected world.
Splendeurs et Misères du Knowledge Worker
March 13, 2011
 |
 |
Travailleur de la connaissance : celle ou celui qui travaille avec l’information ou qui développe la connaissance dans le cadre de son activité professionnelle. (Peter Drucker – 1959)
Une définition simple et visionnaire qui prend d’autant plus de pertinence aujourd’hui qu’une proportion croissante de nos activités s’articule autour de l’économie de la connaissance. Les nouveaux médias du numérique y jouent un rôle prépondérant en contribuant à la diffusion de l’information, à la fluidification sociale et à la capacitation des travailleurs de la connaissance.
Sommes-nous pour autant épanouis et libérés de toute contrainte ? The Social Network propose des éléments de réponse …
Eloge du Carburateur – Matthew B. Crawford
November 17, 2010
 |
 |
Matthew B. Crawford est un pur produit de l’économie de la connaissance : il est docteur en philosophie politique. Pourtant, avec cet ouvrage (Eloge du Carburateur – Essai sur le sens et la valeur du travail), il attaque celle-ci de front et chante les louanges philosophiques des activités manuelles. En philosophe authentique, l’auteur a aligné ses actes sur sa philosophie et a délaissé ses activités fructueuses dans un think tank de Washington pour ouvrir son garage de réparation de motos.
Un ouvrage accessible qui réfléchit à cette question fondamentale : comment faire sens de notre contribution professionnelle ? Une rhétorique originale et virulente battant en brêche une pensée majoritaire qui sacralise la connaissance au détriment de la pratique.
Il ne s’agit pas ici de nourrir la nostalgie d’une vie plus simple, soi disant plus authentique et dotée d’une aura démocratique liée à la classe ouvrière. Cet essai a pour objectif de montrer le potentiel d’épanouissement humain offert par les métiers manuels et la richesse de leur défi cognitif.
Première partie de l’article dédié à cet ouvrage : les 10 idées majeures du livre. Dans la seconde partie, ce blog y répond depuis une perspective de Manager et de travailleur de la connaissance.
Le travail à l’ère du numérique – Conférence
November 11, 2010
Où va le monde du travail à l’ère du numérique ? [Conférence].
J’ai l’honneur d’avoir été invité par l’AEC Aquitaine pour intervenir aux côtés de l’excellent Serge Soudoplatoff et de Yves Eudes du Monde le 30 Novembre 2010 à Bordeaux durant la conférence des Chaires des Civilisations Numériques.
Le sujet de cette édition des Chaires est le travail à l’ère du numérique. Nous débattrons d’un certain nombre de sujets et essaierons d’apporter des réponses aux questions suivantes :
- Comment les entreprises françaises intègrent-elles ces réalités ?
- Les nouvelles technologies du numérique sont-elles vraiment profitables à toutes les organisations ?
- Quelles sont les nouvelles compétences à détecter et à valoriser dans le monde du travail ?
- Le numérique est-il plus pourvoyeur que destructeur d’emplois ?
Sujet passionnant et casting impressionnant dans lequel je me positionnerai en tant que pur produit de la culture internet (i.e blogger). Je tâcherai d’apporter une perspective empirique, où se croisent des réflexions inspirées par ma solide expérience de Knowledge Worker au contact de le culture geek d’une part et, d’autre part, celles inspirées par mon expérience à l’étranger me permettant de porter un regard extérieur sur l’entreprise.fr.
Je serai ravi de vous y rencontrer !
The Egoless Knowledge Worker
July 7, 2010
 |
 |
|
|
When I started working as a Junior Developer in the early 90s, I was developing application software in airline mainframe systems (for the record : IBM TPF technology). Dozen thousands of users (travel agents, airline reservation offices), hundredth thousands transactions a day.
Back in those days we were developing in Assembler/370, a programming language which, roughly speaking, is to today’s programming languages what a 70s calculator is to an iPad. Anyway, that was the most appropriate technology to get things done fast on these mainframe systems.
The problem was : a programming mistake (e.g. pointer error) would end up in mistakenly over-writing the core system, bringing the whole system down and having travel agents all around the planet without any system to enter customer bookings. Coding error would easily cost millions of dollars.
So you didn’t want to mess with the code and for each piece of code you wrote, you were having code reviews by your peers. Half a dozen professionals discussing every single line of code, the number of CPU cycles for each instruction etc … More than often, these code reviews turned out to be some kind of Arena in which professionals happened to struggle to find out who was the toughest TPF gladiator.
Prior to one of my first code review, my team leader (Tony Knight – an exemplary manager) provided me with a guideline to help me taking a step back and cool down : the 10 commandments of ego-less programming. This has since proved to be a professional life savior for me. Read the rest of this entry »
J’ai eu la chance d’être invité par l’AEC aquitaine pour une conférence sur le retour de leur mission dans la Silicon Valley.
Du beau monde impliqué dans la mission pour un retour enrichi par les différents profils et les différentes perspectives sur l’eldorado du monde numérique :
- Anne-Marie Keiser, Vice-présidente du Conseil général de Gironde
- Thierry Gellé, Vice-président de la Communauté urbaine de Bordeaux
- Antoine Cuerq, Délégué régional EDF Aquitaine
- Thierry Happe, Président et co-fondateur du Forum Netexplorateur
Le débat a été animé par Thierry Ulmet directeur de la communication de l’AEC. (sorry d’avance c’est super long).
 |
Since I did it in french, I felt it was unfair not to share it with the english speaking world as well.
Youtube version also is available – I keep Vimeo as main since it is not as popular as Youtube and therefore it is not blocked by companies firewall.
So here it is : 10 questions to benchmark your organisation in the 21st century. Based on the five elevator pitches and on the latest Hypertextual articles on the Enterprise 2.0, mostly the ones related to Gary Hamel and engagement.
Music from my band Supernormal. A song I wrote as a tribute to Mark Kozelek‘s Red House Painters, one of my favorite band ever.
 |
 |
At the Enterprise 2.0 Forum, during the Workshop on the Wednesday afternoon, Bertrand Duperrin proposed some Enterprise 2.0 definitions from both Andrew McAfee and himself. Bertrand insisted on the fact it was a moving definition, constantly evolving.
Regardless of how good these definitions were, I’m still not fully convinced. My concern is that they don’t address the management issue. And the more I think about Enterprise 2.0, the more I think it has a direct connection to management.Therefore, the definition should really focus on that point.
Enterprise 2.0 Forum à Paris
January 27, 2010
L’Enterprise 2.0 Forum se déroulera les 17 et 18 Mars à Paris au Méridien Montparnasse.
Cette édition succède à celle de Francfort qui a eu lieu l’Automne dernier et précède celle de Cologne qui aura lieu elle au Printemps prochain.
ECM World souhaite, avec ces conférences, donner une dimension résolument européenne à la réflexion globale qui a lieu aujourd’hui autour de l’Entreprise 2.0.
L’objectif est de s’assurer que ce nouveau système transverse d’entreprise, structurant l’organisation tel un ERP, SCM ou PLM, n’est pas uniquement calibré autour des valeurs et cultures d’entreprises anglo-saxonnes.
Par ici pour le programme et les bons de réduction …
Enterprise 2.0 : knowledge, innovation, productivity and engagement
October 14, 2009
 |
(Please check the revised edition of this presentation).
Just uploaded this Enterprise-2.0 presentation : Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation, productivity and engagement.
Best to see full screen.
Target audience is just about everyone in the company.
Hypertextual RSS Feed
