Four Groups

Archive for November, 2009

McKinsey have a video interview with MIT researcher and Mr. Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee.

The two highlights from a HR perspective are below.

1. 9.08 – A brief mention of the possibility of Enterprise 2.0 increasing levels of human capital
2. 3.15 – The idea that Enterprise 2.0 tools help increase the effectiveness of human-centric managers

Embedding the video didn’t seem to work, but the full interview can be watched here.

Karl wrote recently on ‘Re-Writing the operating system for business‘ and the impact that technology and the internet is having on business models and entire organisations.

Reading the post, I was struck how much of what is said could apply equally to HR as much as it could businesses as a whole and with this in mind, here are some of my own re-writes from Karl’s piece (my changes are in bold!).

The web and social media is going to empower and change EVERY ASPECT of HR

The way human beings are motivated to connect and create value has changed (no re-write on this one!)

HR has to realize that it is a co-creative eco-system that includes employees, partners, competitors and customers and the way people are motivated to create and realize value is the only measure of success

It’s important to mention how HR needs to change as it is one of the greatest impediments to change for a corporation as it is where the culture of value creation is created

It hard to both argue with and do justice to John Hagel’s work on the Shift Index and his finding that returns on assets in US public companies have been falling since 1965.

Extracts follow and the full pdf is online here. From a HR point of view however, the takeaway seems to be twofold;

• New technologies and organisational designs lead to improved performance
• Collaboration curves may make it possible to enable larger numbers of people to create greater levels of value, increasing returns to scale in the process

From John’s blog;

The real challenge is to figure out how firms, caught in a pincer move between more powerful customers and talent, can create more economic value and improve their own profitability.

Given the profound performance deterioration that firms have experienced over decades, it is time to step back and reassess our most fundamental assumptions about what is required to be successful in business. If we have any hope of turning this longer-term trend around, we must be prepared to challenge our current approaches to business.

In particular, we believe that the two foundational catalysts driving intensified competition – digital infrastructures and public policy shifts favoring economic liberalization- also create the conditions for dramatic performance improvement.

We believe that for the first time, given a combination of new digital infrastructures and new institutional architectures, it may be possible to turn the experience curve on its side and for the first time generate performance curves with increasing returns – the more participants, the more rapidly performance improves. We use the term collaboration curves to describe this new opportunity.