Massive corporations will always be more opaque for their employees than smaller ones. Working in a small team, you can take the time to learn your colleagues, speak with them about the projects, understand the motivations behind every decision. It is impossible to do the same in a company employing thousands of people. Most of large organisations understand this is a weakness, putting at risk employee engagement, creativity and consistency between departments. Tactics to mitigate these risks are common practice. But they are hard to implement and rarely successful. Internal communication becomes often a mistrusted campaign where information is manipulated at the convenience of the stakeholders agenda. Supposedly informal Q&A sessions between employees and their direction leave often a feeling of dissatisfaction, becoming merely a practice exercise for the direction to repeat their ready-made answers and for employees to face the reality of top-down corporate decision making processes. In this context, intranet websites encouraging the participation of employees are for most unsuccessful and based on wishful thinking.
Many Smithsonian museums are on the National Mall, so many I was a little lost and overwhelmed during my visit in 2003.
If you are interested in strategic thinking, look at the lecture of Nina Simon at the Smithsonian. It is a long video but I think it encompasses many important subjects: how to use tools such as twitter to make an ethnographic study of your audience, what are the best practices to define the mission statement of your organisation, how to interact with your visitors and provide something really valuable for them. Even though the subject is museums, I believe that most of the presentation can be applied to any type of organization. The speaker attempts to provide clear recommendations to the Smithsonian auditorium but I feel looking at the Q&A section that it may take a while before anything happens in such a big institution. This should not stop the rest of us adopting her recommendations. You can find much more on her blog: http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/05/everyones-smithsonian-video-slides-and.html
Both crowdsourcing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are fashionable these days. Here is their definition:
“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”
Somehow dubious video from the creator of the name ‘crowdsourcing’
“Corporate Social Responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. Essentially, CSR is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making, and the honouring of a triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit.”
I was at the World Mobile Congress last week and I wondered, what are the key players in the mobile? Not that I don’t know already this industry, it is my day job. The most wealthy companies are for sure the network operators and the mobile manufacturers (e.g. Vodafone, Nokia). The ones getting the most attention from journalists are Apple, Google for example. But what about the customer, what is the most important part for him? And will it always be the same or does it change with the maturity of the industry?
I just launched my new project, “curated matter” and defined its mission, vision and core values. I had the idea in March 2008 but it took months of passive reflection to come up with its final definition. The good thing about defining the mission of a venture beforehand is that you can then easily understand what the goals and priorities are.
