One of the most popular posts on this blog continues to be my brief recap of Tom Wujec’s TED University talk on making ideas visible.  As a professional communicator I’m always looking for new tips on creating effective presentations.

I don’t know how many of you have seen the Death By PowerPoint presentation by Alexei Kapterev of Real Time Strategy; however, judging from the hit count, over three hundred thousand to date, many of you probably have.

I looked it over again tonight and then noticed a very ironic comment by a guest:

61 slides to get the point across? Say less, do more.

Zing!

All kidding aside, there are some good messages in there.  Thanks, Alex

Roger W. Farnsworth 

I was looking over some opinions on the challenges faced by organisations as they try to create more useful, personalised experiences for their internal users and I started to think about how difficult a challenge this really is.

When you’re selling football jerseys it’s pretty straightforward to personalise an offer based on a user profile or browsing history, but our world at work is more subtle and complex, and streamlining the online experience of a collaborative employee is a delicate undertaking.

It’s no longer enough to just work with content and tags; too often that just results in users being overloaded with the corporate perspective on subjects in which they have a minor interest.

In the Web 1.0 world finding those who are interested in seeing your content was key. In the Web 2.0 world, interacting with those individuals or groups with whom you share an interest is the goal. In the next wave of networked innovation we’re likely to see a much deeper and more participative experience, and that will require more selectivity in order to prevent us from being overwhelmed; however, if you are too selective, or omit the wrong information, productivity and effectiveness suffer.

In today’s workplace it’s not just the context of content that is important, but also the context of such things as personal and professional contacts, current projects, priorities, location, personal preferences and current access method(s).

There’s a lot of discussion floating around the Internet about what Web 3.0 might mean.  Personally, I think Web 3.0 will emerge when the depth of understanding necessary to correlate more than 3 or 4 of these variables within the network is readily available, creating an amazingly accurate personalised online experience, and the usefulness of the intranet will expand rapidly from there.

Roger W. Farnsworth

Back in the mid-80s I worked at one of the Bell operating companies wrestling with the realities of a post-divestiture existence.  Over many weeks, and in countless hours of seemingly endless meetings, we worked with a team of leadership-development experts to craft the “Mission Statements” that would catapult our business into the new telecommunications age.

Awkward, cumbersome and practically indecipherable, these mission statements were created by committee and then wordsmithed to the point that almost all meaning had been extracted.  The resulting vapid paragraph probably made sense to the people that created it, but drop it in front of the workers on the team and the blank stares were a silent testament to the futility of the exercise.

Fast forward to today, where the world of heirarchical, command-and-control management is rapidly giving way to a new, more exciting model of distributed, communication- and collaboration-based leadership.  In this new world, it is absolutely imperative that people at all levels of the organisation understand the real vision guiding them, not just have some hackneyed cart of meaningless prose dumped on them like the mission statements of yore.

To be successful, today’s organisations need clarity — a clear vision shared by all members of the community.  A guide star, if you will.

A few months ago, Carmine Gallo wrote a good article in BusinessWeek that describes the necessity of a clear vision to successful businesses.  In it, he describes how “consistently delivering a simple, memorable, and concise vision can make the difference between a successful business and a failing business.”

Yves Doz, a professor at the respected business school INSEAD, agrees.  In an article explaining his research, Yves points out the need for CEOs to “be able to articulate the corporate value added clearly, convincingly and compellingly enough that people start to believe in it.”  Creating this shared vision and then structuring the organisation in a way that enables and rewards collaboration is key to success in the fast-paced word in which we operate.

There are a handful of attributes that a successful vision shares:

1. A vision must be clear and concise enough that it is immediately and powerfully apparent 
2. A vision must be broad enough in scope
3. A vision must call for physical as well as cultural or attitudinal changes 
4. A vision must include a clear picture of the role of the organisation, and it’s constituent members, in effecting the change

Offhand, I can think of a few pretty famous examples of companies losing sight of their vision and suffering spectacular falls from grace.  What do you think are some important things to consider when creating and communicating a strong vision within the organisation?

Roger W. Farnsworth

I spoke a bit about the changing complexion of the workplace in an online article on bMighty.com that was highlighted in a previous blog entry.  The larger sense of connectedness that we are all experiencing as the network emerges as the platform is literally transforming the components of the personal/corporate/social equilibrium.

In his book, The Future of Work, Tom Malone speaks to the drastic changes that are likely to effect the workplace of the future as the democratisation of information opens up new, market-based opportunities for individuals to contribute to organisations and more distributed decision making begins to take hold.  Despite the potential for some disruptive transformation, the overall message is positive — workers in the future are likely to be much more participative in shaping business processes.

Now, a recent report by the Chartered Management Institute entitled Management Futures - The World in 2018 describes some colorful scenarios that we might see 10 years in the future.  Some of these results were covered in an article in the Guardian:

The institute put findings from the report to more than 1,000 senior executives. It found 74% expected “virtual teams of employees”, working at a distance from each other, to become the norm by 2018.

About 64% thought talented people would become “multi-employed,” 59% said job hopping would be commonplace and 56% said most routine tasks would be automated.

Two-thirds of the executives expected global corporations to exert more influence than governments. Almost as many forecast an increase in customer participation in business decisions and the creation of products with longer life cycles to meet environmental concerns.

The report recognises the need for employees and employers to come to terms with the realities of a world under pressure for scarce resources, an aging population and the increasing visibility of their actions.  Changes in lifestyle, work habits and even the nature of employment itself is likely to evolve radically.

Clearly we’re in for a world of changes.  What opportunities are you looking forward to seeing and what are you most concerned about?

Roger W. Farnsworth

A couple of months ago one of my colleagues wrote about the importance of trust to business. As business relationships become more fluid, and dynamic collaborative engagements emerge as the norm, new methods of establishing, maintaining and quantifying trust must emerge.

But before you can know your partner, or your competitor for that matter, it might be best to know yourself.

Charles H. Green has just posted a nifty online self-assessment tool to calculate one’s own Trust Quotient. While I was taking it, I wondered if the kind of unsavory folks you likely shouldn’t trust would lie on the test and thus score well.

Does that make me devious or simply curious?

In his blog today, George Ambler offers a neat summary of some work that social psychologist Robert Hurley published on the topic of trust in Harvard Business Review .

Clearly there are a lot of dimensions to trust, and with the help of some of these tools you might be better able to adjust your approach to an important meeting or collaborative engagement to achieve better results.

Roger W. Farnsworth

Stephen Collins of acidlabs has put together a pretty sporty presentation that addresses the challenges facing knowledge workers as we transition to a networked knowledge economy. In it he calls for attention to people, tools and process to unlock the potential of the organisation.

A couple of weeks ago, Ray Sims posted a presentation on knowledge management that used understandable metaphors to stimulate my thinking.  It’s interesting to think of knowledge as water and contemplate the way it flows; however, I  really like the knowledge as love metaphor.  It made me think of the .38 Special song from the 80s, Hold On Loosely.  It’s only when sharing knowledge that we ultimately benefit from it.

He also boiled down the four greatest opportunities of this shift we’re seeing:

• Increased social capital
• Increased innovation
• Improved decision making
• Improved efficiency

I’ve seen all of these items on corporate wish lists; it looks like we might be headed in the right direction.

Roger W. Farnsworth

We process bushels of information in the research business, and our stock in trade is figuring out new ways to look at this information in order to find those magic revelations that make everyone exclaim, “Aha! Of course!” So I’m always interested in finding the latest tools that help you visualise data.

Last month, Read Write Web put together a great list of tools that do just that. From music to pictures to plain old data, there’s a tool for everyone on this list.

One of my favorite artists that works in the world of data visualisation is Jonathan Harris. I remember how fascinated I was when I first saw his project We Feel Fine as he presented it at TED 2007. Together with Sep Kamvar, he has just released a new perspective of online dating for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

I Want You to Want Me is a neat overview on the online dating phenomenon that does what great visualisation tools should - it provides creative, easily personalised perspectives on data, in an engaging way, and communicates information clearly using colors, shapes and other visual cues.

Roger W. Farnsworth

Most of the articles and opinions on Web 2.0 and its use in large corporations that I see are either written by end users or analysts. While everyones opinion is important when it comes to these new, more participative applications, it’s corporate leaders who have the greatest opportunity to foster change in business, so it’s always interesting to hear what they’re thinking.

Although the report is almost a year old now, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit a report from a discussion that was held at the Center for Digital Strategies of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth last summer. For Web 2.0 and the Corporation, A Thought Leadership Roundtable on Digital Strategies, a large group of executives was convened and given the opportunity to discuss the whys, hows and what-ifs of Web 2.0 in business.

Ultimately, Web 2.0 is about extending business interactions, inside and outside the business, in order to create more powerful experiences for customers, partners and employees.

I thought the discussion, especially as it related to trust and transparency, was fascinating. Web 2.0 is letting individuals push the boundaries of what’s possible and challenge long-standing business processes. During this talk there were some intelligent comments on the questions companies face as they balance the benefits of enabling this change against the legitimate need for monitoring and control.

What do you think? Is your company doing enough to enable, or even encourage, Web 2.0?

Roger W. Farnsworth

One of our research partners, Erik Brynjolfsson at The Center for Digital Business at MIT, has been working on some interesting research for the last few years, and his latest published findings continue to shed light on the role that information technology has in shaping knowledge worker productivity.

Erik and his team were able to empirically measure the impact of technology on task-level work in an information-centric work environment and really dig into the nuts and bolts of the productivity puzzle.

One finding that jumped out was their observation that information technology enhancements created “IT-enabled slack” as processes were improved. As a world-class slacker through most of school, I liked the sound of that.

The report says that as IT improvements were introduced in the study environments the researchers were able to measure small changes in the component processes of the workers tasks. The resulting process optimisation created “slack” that allowed information workers to spend more time on value-adding communication activities, which led directly to productivity and performance improvements, and also gave them more personal time relaxing and resting at work or at home.

More overall productivity and more downtime? Sign me up!

Roger W. Farnsworth

Carmine Gallo has a few helpful tips for people hosting web meetings in his BusinessWeek column this week. It’s nice to see Robb Boyd get mentioned. I’ve worked with Robb in the past and he’s taught me a few things about presenting in new media environments.

One of the tips in Carmine’s article recommends engaging your audience at least once every 15 minutes during a web presentation in order to maintain their attention. That seems way too long to me. Assuming a piece of online content is interesting, how long do you usually stay focused on the content before the inevitable multitasking begins?

One theme Carmine highlights is correct; it’s absolutely true that audiences are getting more sophisticated, but don’t think that you have to use the latest technology all of the time in order to capture an audience.  Sometimes technologies can be more distracting than helpful.  Think about the most appropriate media for your particular message and don’t ever lose sight of the needs of the audience.

Paying attention to your audience and its desires is an important way to avoid the “gee whiz” technology trap.

Roger W. Farnsworth