New Way 2 Work

Traci Fenton (CEO, WorldBlue) describes this in a simple way as:

Democratic Design + Freedom-Centered Leadership = A Democratic Company

Enterprise2.0 technologies provide a great promise to enable and accelerate the move for organizations to become more democratic and innovative. We at Injoos have espoused this in our product philisophy:

We believe in the power of the collective to make things happen and this has been amply demonstrated by social networks. Bringing the same philosophy to an enterprise, we believe will allow people to break the shackles and communicate uninhibitedly. The power of the collective not only can solve things for an organization quickly but also helps in filtering relevant information to the user. Injoos was created with this in mind - the people and we believe that Injoos teamware will help organizations unleash the collective power of their people to solve business problems and to innovate.

You can watch Traci explain in detail on the WorldBlue model for companies.

We have heard of the “carrot and stick” mode of management and we believe in it. Whether it is a school, government or business everyone employs carrot and stick model in some way or another. What if this hypothesis was wrong? What if it’s applicability had weakened in the current times? Dan Pink analyzes this question and argues his case that businesses should go beyond “carrot and stick” for motivating employees in this TED talk. I agree with Dan and have personally seen how many of the policies in large organizations failed to make any impact due to this mindset.

• Firstly what motivates people to come to office is the quality of work. Give them substandard work and you will not get them motivated with any amount of incentives.
• What we really need in to empower employees to take decisions and not treat them with kid gloves.
• Lastly and most importantly keep the communication channels open and transparent. People are far more technologically networked than almost a decade ago and there is no way companies can afford to create silos.

Watch the TED video below and share your views.

While listening the talk delivered by Clay Shirky at TED what stuck me was that the same phenomenon he is indicating in the open world also exists in Enterprises & businesses. People do have time on hand which when tapped effectively could prove a game changer for Enterprises especially in these tough times. So what is Cognitive surplus? Clay roughly estimates that there is around trillion hours a year spare time available with people in the world which could be used for community activity whether it be social or creative in nature. He explains how products are created in the open source world, the Wiki model, etc. So are companies doing anything about this? Yes, the leading organizations have recognized this fact and coded it in their DNA. For e.g. Google give close 20% time off to employees to work on pet projects and have shown that some of these projects have come out as new company products (ex. Google news). Watch this interesting video and share your views.

I attended the recent concluded cloudforce conference in Bangalore and where the discussion was around email on it’s way out in the consumer space and how the same trend will follow inside corporate walls. This is a theme which we have been continuously discussing on our blogs in the last two years and have seen many organizations using social tools like Injoos reduce their email dependency considerably. In our case inside Injoos it is zero. Here is a video of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at Nielsen Consumer 360 where she talks on the same theme. Email on its way out !

Related link:

http://injoos.com/blog/newway2work/2008/08/29/steps-of-solution-to-ajays-identity/