Sep 16, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Communication
Social networks have boomed, tools to enable the networks abound, MySpace, twitter, face book et al being the most well known, but many more fail than succeed, and they do so based on the degree of mutuality that exists.
Bear with me here.
Imagine 2 people who have $10 to distribute between them, one has the power to divide the money any way he likes, the other has just one thing, the right to accept or veto the deal for them both.
Rational economics would suggest that the holder of the veto would accept any deal that has him better off beyond the inconvenience of saying yes or no, say 2 cents, as both parties will be better off with a yes. However, experiments consistently demonstrate that the second person will veto any offer he sees as unfair, resulting in both parties losing, and this “fairness” point kicks in around a 70/30 split.
This implies there is a deep willingness to punish unfairness, even at personal cost, and that there is a strong emotional dimension to decision making, something very hard for economists to take account of in their models.
This emotional dimension underpinning behavior has profound implications for the way we should be thinking about the development of networks, irrespective of weather they are social, commercial or political ones.
Social networking works because there is an unspoken deal in place, which promises mutuality, Wikipedia being a shining example, there appears to be no control and there isn’t, control is exercised by the “wiki community” by virtue of their ability to remove any incorrect, irrelevant, or corruptive content, the access to the edit key which is easier to exercise than the effort required to post something, keeps things on track. Wikipedia in its earliest incarnation was a failure, as it left control with a small group of expert editors and contributors, with nothing left for the community which then failed to show up, as the “mutuality deal” was not in place.
Much of my work is with farmer groups, and the greatest challenge in the formative stages of getting a group “over the line” is the notion of mutuality, and how the group coalesces around a source of that mutuality, then finds ways to self regulate, if it is to be successful.
Aug 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Leadership
This hung election has generated a tsunami of comment, but nothing I have seen on the mechanics of collaboration, a key factor in any lasting resolution to the impasse I would have thought.
The idea of a “party” is simply an expression of the need for group action to get anything done. In the case of the two major parties the early collaboration around an idea has long been replaced by the institutional battle for survival, the original reason for the formation of the party forgotten.
By contrast, consider the Greens. They evolved from a protest group coalesing around opposition to the Franklin dam in Tasmania, through to political group with the power to protest in a wider forum of proportionally elected houses state upper houses, (Federal senate, NSW Legislative Council) from which all we expected was protest, to a party that now carries a veto over all legislation, which is a far wider remit than a one issue protest.
This last step is a game changer, one the Democrats failed. But what of the three independents in the house of Reps? Almost by accident they have the power of veto if they act collaboratively, but it seems to be emerging that consistent collaborative action may fail them just because the rallying point around which they can coalesce is far more ambiguous than the Greens “save the Franklin” and the Democrats “keep the bastards honest” and therefore the collaboration lacks some of the “glue” essential to a collaborative effort, and they lack the institutional organisation that is the alternative.
It will be interesting to watch, and I suspect that there will be an agreement that sees the “Mad Monk” as PM with the nominal support of the three independents, which will become very fragile as the next full moon impacts on Bob.
Aug 1, 2010 | Alliance management, Leadership, Management, Social Media, Strategy
Knowledge Management is all about collaboration, making the 3 + 3 equal > 6, but the challenge has always been how do you codify the knowledge for dissemination and re-use, implying the existence of both strategy, and a management mechanism for the knowledge.
By comparison, social networking is largely uncontrolled, and lacks a strategy beyond “to connect”, but it nevertheless has become a source of knowledge management.
Social networking brings to the table two factors not usually prominent in KM systems:
- Humanity, people connecting and interacting for the personal value, not monetary value, it reminds of the notion of “commons” where groups assemble because they can leverage off the social, intellectual and commercial base of the “common”
- Social networking offers the opportunity not just to form horizontal connections as happens in managed KM systems, but for the vertical, and oblique connections that offer the opportunity for insights and capabilities in an organic manner, rather like the organic metaphor for innovation.
It appears to me that an application for social networking techniques that will evolve quite rapidly will be as a new and powerful tool that will enable the rich and varied collaboration so crucial for the innovation process.
Jul 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Communication, Leadership
Contracts are the point of last resort, they define the exit, should it become necessary.
Believing a written contract that details how the dynamics of an evolving relationship will be managed is as dumb as believing the lady in the tent can tell the future with any accuracy.
Relationships are about leadership, collaboration, honesty, and a mutual respect, and a reversion to the clauses in a contract are a clear pointer to the failure of the relationship and the leadership.
A while ago, a business I have had intermittent contact with over a long period set about outsourcing their IT function. It is only a modest business, short of resources, and took the view that the IT people were the experts, and that they should know all there was to know about how to approach their problems, and that the resources freed up could be better used elsewhere. Problem was, they had not adequately defined their processes and expectations, and the vendor saw it as a small sale, perhaps not worth their best efforts.
There were some tough lessons in the exercise, and at their most basic broke down to the simple fact that nobody could know their business as well as they did, and a generic set of solutions sold to a modest business were never going to be successful.
The vendor failed in their duty to meet their needs, once the sales contract was signed, they “moved on” and the company failed badly in the implementation, and the whole exercise ended very badly.
The simple fact is that the “solution” could have, and should have worked, the company’s logic was sound, and the solution had all the fundamentals to deliver a great service, but the relationship failed. Rather than leveraging the skills and experience of both parties to arrive at a successful outcome, they took the easy way out and just fought over who would carry the can. Really dumb!
May 23, 2010 | Alliance management, Innovation, Leadership, Operations, Strategy
The momentum of innovation in the auto industry has picked up a notch, as a resurgent Toyota allies with Tesla to re-open the NUMMI plant closed earlier this year to produce a mass market electric car.
Toyota got the ball rolling 10 years ago with the Prius, and still leads by a mile in the eco car market, but the competition is emerging. This alliance with Tesla in the plant where Toyota allied with GM for its first plant outside Japan, demonstrating comprehensively that the quality of Japanese cars was not a function of some cultural phenomena peculiar to Japan, but simply a function of good management (a lesson GM never really got) may be just as significant.
It is reassuring to those of us who have watched Toyota transform the manufacturing mentality of the world over the last 30 years with their development and wide sharing of TPS, that after the recent stumble over quality, a stumble some predicted as the Toyota juggernaught seemed to be taking over the auto world, that they have been able to embrace the alliance, and return to the basic values that made them great.
With luck, they will be as open about the engineering and operational evolution of the JV electric car, and the lessons they learn from the alliance with Tesla, as they have been in the past. If so we will all learn a whole lot more.
May 12, 2010 | Alliance management, Demand chains, Leadership, Operations
Successful groups have great power, power to identify, understand the causes and implications of problems and opportunities, and come up with creative responses, and once moving can gather great momentum. Most workplaces are now actively seeking to harness the intellect and creative power of their employees and other stakeholders, and those that do it well create great opportunity.
The flip side is that groups also have inertia, they are much harder to get rolling than just an individual, and once rolling, have a tendency to take unpredictable excursions.
It is easy to underestimate the effort, leadership, and capacity to connect that is required to overcome this inertia, and to manage the momentum constructively, leading a group in a consistent direction, focusing on the important issues, and consistently delivering outcomes.
I bet Isaac never thought of this application of his laws.
