networks – Page 3

New models for network business: Crowds/Tribes/Teams…

Image: Wanna Play Revolution? Some fine graffiti behind Brighton station...

Networks change everything they touch. New models for business will emerge as we begin to understand their potential.

Recently I’ve seen a potential model for loose networks of individuals to be applied to real-world challenges.

Let me tell you about it…

The SOMESSO conference in London on Friday was a deep draft of insights on how the age of networks is beginning to transform business.

I arrived after lunch, just in time to catch a double-blast of Lee Bryant and Umair Haque. Both had intensely engaging and compelling arguments to make – Lee about throwing off the 20th’s century organisation’s legacies and Umair about how the Obama campaign gives us a view on how 21st century organsations can succeed. More on those later, mostly likely – they were taking mee deeper into ideas I’ve been following them develop on their respective blogs.

There was something very new to me though, in Lloyd Davis’s presentation based loosley around the themes and stories of being a “social artist” and the work of art that is the Tuttle Club.

Social Media Club’s been running in London for a while now, and new nodes are springing up in various locales. And now Lloyd a hundred or so Tuttlers are trying out a new approac to appying their distributed talents, experiences and knowledge to real-world problems.

The formula is simple: Crowds / Tribes / Teams. (Its so elegant and compelling that I recalled it immediately afterwards without referring to notes, and have had the phrase/structure bouncing round my head all weekend.)

Read Lloyd’s post at the Tuttle Club blog for more on this, but here’s the nub as it is applied to a consulting process:

We begin by meeting you as a Crowd of highly experienced, highly creative and highly competent people. As we engage with your business, we work with you to create a series of Tribes – groups formed around your specific business issues, made up of those most engaged by them, and with experience most relevant to them. Finally, each Tribe becomes a Team, committed to delivering clearly defined solutions to specific, carefully considered issues.

This model is no in play, apparently. I can’t wait to hear about their adventures…

New models for network business: Crowds/Tribes/Teams…

Networks change everything they touch. New models for business will emerge as we begin to understand their potential.

Recently I’ve seen a potential model for loose networks of individuals to be applied to real-world challenges.

Let me tell you about it…

The SOMESSO conference in London on Friday was a deep draft of insights on how the age of networks is beginning to transform business.

There was something very new to me though, in Lloyd Davis’s presentation based loosley around the themes and stories of being a “social artist” and the work of art that is the Tuttle Club.

Read Lloyd’s post at the Tuttle Club blog for more on this, but here’s the nub as it is applied to a consulting process:

We begin by meeting you as a Crowd of highly experienced, highly creative and highly competent people. As we engage with your business, we work with you to create a series of Tribes – groups formed around your specific business issues, made up of those most engaged by them, and with experience most relevant to them. Finally, each Tribe becomes a Team, committed to delivering clearly defined solutions to specific, carefully considered issues.

This model is no in play, apparently. I can’t wait to hear about their adventures…

Communities of purpose

I like David Cushman’s take on the way that the web disrupts everything it touches.

My main focus has been in thinking about the shift from channels to networks in media. Reading David reminds me that it is everything that looks like a chain, especially value chains, that are things that networks will rip apart.

Then, as he should, he makes it personal:

If you can find part – a kernel – a piece that is truly yours and which you truly believe in, congratulations, that is something of great valuable, which others will find value in and join you in building on. (image courtesy cayusa)

That is your contribution to the new creation webs which will emerge as communities of purpose become the business units of the 21st century.

Communities of purpose. Yes – that’s something to remember. And those purposes might last a few hours or a few decades. That purpose might be the marketer’s fantasy of grouping around the purpose of buying a product, celebrating a scrap of content, or a politician’s nightmare of an organised poplace come to dictate terms on a piece of legislation.

“Command and control is dead”: the shape of next gen organisations is social networks

Image: John Chambers, CEO of Cisco: “command and control is dead”.

A lot of the questions I have had floating around my head for the past few years are beginning to be answered by innovative companies. Questions about how you manage companies, organisations, in the age of networks, when you have to move beyond the cloying constrictions of command and control hierarchies.

I was listening to a fantastic episode of Peter Day’s Global Business (can’t find it to link to on the BBC website – subscribe to it on iTunes if you don’t already). He was interviewing John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, about how the company was developing to keep up witht he pace of the web revolution.

The answer was that over the past two years Mr Chambers has been tearing down command and control as a way of doing things at Cisco. Why? Because “command and control is dead”, as will the companies that cling to it over the next five to ten years, he says.

Hunting around for more on the Cisco approach, I came across this lecture (can’t embed the video, please follow the link) John Chambers gave at MIT in January. It’s very, very good indeed – my ears pricked up especially at about 18 minutes in when he started talking about managing the 65.000 person business via social netowrks.

Uses a system of global councils (which build around a social networking group) to tackle any business need or challenge – they sketch out an outline approach within a couple of days and have a business plan in place in a couple of weeks (each council on market opportunities tends to be looking at $10 billion+ markets).
This networked, cross-functional approach is prioritised for all. Leaders are incentivised most of all on cross-functional success. [This is brilliant – focusing energy on tearing down divisions, siloes etc.] Behaviours changed very quickly once incentives were altered.
“I have 26 [of these Global Council networks] at the moment – I think it may be too few.” Previously Cisco’s operating committee were able to to tackle perhaps two or three of these issues a year.
“Speed and scale” – this is the imperative for adopting networks as a way of working. More gets done faster.
“I blog. I would never have said I would blog two years ago. I video blog all of my messaging.”
Currently there Social networking approach means that instead of bringing 10 top leaders to bear on problems in the company he is able to get 50 to 500 leading. [Flatter organisations mean more leaders.]
Listen to how he had to adapt as a leader (59 minutes) – this was an effort of will for John personally. He had to sit on his hands and learn how not to be directive, among other things. But very quickly people were “making better decisions than I could have”.