I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes. This is another of my notes for this year. There will be more to follow. I attended panel session - Inventing Management 2.0: Radical Yet Practical Insights to Becoming a True "Social Enterprise" led by The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX). Here is the session description:
“The Social Web holds clues for how to improve our organizations, making them more resilient, inventive, and engaging. Imagine overcoming the limits of "Management 1.0" to create organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, focused but not myopic, specialized but not balkanized, efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, disciplined but not disempowering.
"Management 2.0" is the focus of a "hackathon" run by The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) in partnership with Saba and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. Since its launch at E2 Santa Clara, the Management 2.0 Hackathon has grown into a far-flung collaboration project involving over 850 progressive management practitioners, technologists, and thinkers from around the globe to explore ways in which the principles of Web 2.0 can serve as inspiration for transforming how all organizations will be run and managed over the next decade. The best of their thinking is now ready to share, consolidated into a few management "hacks" — blueprints for organizations of the future.”
The concept was to rethink what management looks like. It is a continuation of the conversation started last November. The panel was led by Chris Grams. Mary Woolf is part of an organization that is using some of the hacks that have come out of MIX. Nyla Reed works for the Educe Group and Dave Mason is from Mozilla.
MIX is the Management Exchange was started by Gary Hammel and others who feel management is broken because traditional management was created in the machine age when people were treated as parts of machines. A management hackathon is a collaborative effort to re-think management. They began in November and had over 900 participants from around the world. They developed 60 mini-hacks. These were narrowed down to 20 management hacks.
They started by discussing what is wrong about management. Then they moved to what is right about the internet that could be applied to management. They had 12 principles: trust, speed, serendipity, and others.
They did five sample hacks. Dave described how he worked with the company that made Girl Scout cookies which was very different from his past experience in Open Source IT. He wondered how a group can brainstorm ideas and then give them to a completely different group to see what new things come out. They converge the two groups so the two groups can learn from each other.
Nyla worked on a hack, embracing skills 2.0. She said there is a real need to have a specific organizational mindset and culture. They looked at how you move toward this culture. So they redefined the skills needed in the workplace. They started with five skills with a 20 question assessment. Then you take the skill that you already excel at and do something with it in your organization.
Chris talked about stealth hacks where you just do it and do not seek approval. They look at within the organization where they have too much freedom and places where the do not have enough freedom. They looked at the balance of freedom and accountability. Then they had employees and managers exchange freedom and accountability.
The next hack was to look at processes and open them up. They begin with little and less critical things and then they worked up the importance level.
The next hack was to say that all rewards are based only on what you have done in the past year to see who is contributing now and not just riding on past efforts.
Mary talked about finding natural leaders and seeing who are the most connected people in the organization but are not recognized for this. They created a leader meter to gauge this. Another hack was open contributions by the hidden hero. This helps to focus on the idea and not the person who came up with the idea. The third was a tweet store to share ideas. It is a simple idea that is powerful at the same time. Gary Hammel says that hacks need to be both radical and practical.
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