Hypertextual Sometimes : 2011 #e20 blogosphere wrap-up

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for clicking by in 2011. In a view to keep on providing you with maximal #hypertextual value, please find below the top 10 blog posts from my 2011 readings…

1) The Connected Company by Dave Gray. My favourite read of the year on the city as an organic structure Vs the Entreprise as a hierarchical fixed structure

We tend to design companies the way we design machines: We need the company to perform a certain function, so we design and build it to perform that function. Over time, things change. The company grows beyond a certain point. New systems are needed. Customers want different products and services, so we need to redesign and rebuild the machine, or buy a new one, to serve the new functions. The problem with this kind of thinking is that the nature of a machine is to remain static, while the nature of a company is to grow. This conflict causes all kinds of problems because you have to redesign and rebuild the company while you also need to operate it.

2) Resolving the Trust Paradox by Jon Hagel. A glorious post by Jon Hagel on trust.

At a deeply personal level, trust is built by sharing vulnerability.  If you really trust someone, you will share your vulnerability. It is not only OK, but necessary – it is the foundation of a trust-based relationship. But this is exactly the opposite of what we were taught in a world of knowledge stocks.

3) Pixie Dust and the Mountain of Mediocrity by Kathy Sierra. #hypertextual hero, Kathy Sierra, guest-blogs on GapingVoid a rant against gamification. Wonderful as usual.

I saw exam­ples over and over of social media rock stars with tons of follo­wers, yet they were not able to con­vert those follo­wers into Actual Paying Cus­to­mers unless the pro­duct was what peo­ple really wan­ted. Being super-friendly, “liked”, etc. has limits when it comes to *paying*. I will follow your blog, but no mat­ter how awe­some I think YOU are, I won’t be paying for your book unless I think it’ll make ME a little more awesome.

4) The big failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business. Wonderful piece by Laurie Buczek on why so many Social Business initiatives fail flat. Hint : put social software in the daily workflow.

I left the Enterprise 2.0 program not because I lost passion for social collaboration, but because I realized that the effort had plateaued.  The initiative has achieved quite a bit, but my vision & strategy still hasn’t been fully reached. We didn’t cross the chasm. Social collaboration is still voluntary and optional.  (…)  I have been doing a lot of reflection to nail down the underlying reason our efforts (collective across the industry) aren’t creating an evolution-yet.  So, here is my stake in the ground on what is the big failure of Enterprise 2.0 social business: The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.

5) Why Apple does not need Steve Jobs by the Harvard Business Review. Hint : it’s related to the culture.

The culture has coalesced to such a point that every time someone at Apple makes a decision — from the color of metal panelling in the retail stores to the animations on the iPhone’s interface — that Apple employee has one overriding thought: What would Steve do ?

6) Is your Enterprise Socially Networked or just your employees by über expert Rawn Shah

What you really want to know is diversity, and inter-dependency—how well-connected people are across the different segments. Inter-dependency here is just another way of describing the average number of network connections—or ‘friending’ if you prefer—between people in different job roles. You need a basic understanding of level of dependencies and where they lie before you can get into the deeper question of how these dependencies reflect your organizational needs, processes, and strategy.

7) Social + Lean = Agile. An excellent summary by Dave Dugal (@dave_ideate) of the close similarities between Social Software, Agile Methodologies and Lean approach and how these three can combine to help making the enterprise much more agile and 21st century compliant.

The 20th century automation technologies that enabled tremendous efficiencies now inhibit the effectiveness of 21st century networked collaboration [16, 17, 18]. The standardization of business processes removed human discretion, problem solving, and innovation. Businesses have to overcome this structural barrier; systems need to support a looser form of organization that accommodates variance and change. Enterprise Agility requires a shift from standardized transactions to dynamic interactions. Social needs to be integrated into process itself, it has to be able to direct the flow otherwise it is simply chatter that is ultimately still dependant on conventional change management schemes. Processes need to become 2-way conversations.

8) EU Internet scoreboard does not tell the story by Eric Pfanner (New York Times).  Why Europe has produced no global Internet companies to rival Google, Facebook and Twitter

Yet Europe does trail in one very obvious way. It has produced no global Internet companies to rival the likes of Google, Facebook or Twitter. (…) Europe invests considerably less than other industrialized countries in research and development of information technology, it says.

Another reason may be the sluggish development of cross-border e-commerce within the European Union, which has dampened hopes for the development of the Union’s “single market.” The scoreboard shows that fewer than 9 percent of Europeans bought something from an online retailer based outside their country last year. That is far short of the commission’s goal of 20 percent by 2015.

9) Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011 Boston : Shiny Social Leaves Exuberance Island by Sameer Patel

We’re at the early stages of understanding both the challenges and opportunities that will come from the emergence of an increasingly connected and vocal customer and as a result, the changing contract between her and organizations she choose to do business with. Most critical, the ramifications of this on how we need to be wired internally to meet her expectations of meaningful engagement, expert insight, minimal latency and localized relevancy.

10) Don’t retweet the revolution by John Stepper. Stop evangelising and start listening and doing.

After my epiphany, I’ve stopped promoting capabilities and hoping others would figure out how to use them. I’ve stop talking about the social business revolution. Instead, I’m listening more to the individuals, teams, and divisions at my own firm. To see how social tools and practices – along with the full spectrum of other work innovations – can help improve the basics of what people do every day.

Shall I take this opportunity to do a bit of self promotion and add my favourite #hypertextual blog posts of the year ?

1) Social Software as a culture reagent. How the advent of enterprise social software and the related strong culture forces corporation into introspection regarding their own culture.

2) Splendor & Misery of the Knowledge Worker. Drawing on the movie The Social Network, some thoughts regarding how empowerment may sometimes turn us into some kind of assholes.

3) Why Taylorism prevails and what can we do about it. A pretty similar article to Dave Dugal’s above (though I haven’t read it first).

Happy new year to all of you !