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/

Wiki introduced the paradigm of collective intelligence “that many people can contribute to topic thus enriching the same”. Was popularized by the publicly built encyclopedia the “Wikipedia“. Wikis have become popular as new way of organizing content and sharing knowledge inside enterprises and business. One of the main attraction is that there are many free (Read open source) Wiki applications available e.g Twiki. MediaWiki, PbWiki, etc. But as we found with our own experience and with experience of many of our customers these applications are not user friendly and requires effort to maintain.  Wikis have many drawbacks for effective adoption and I am listing a few:

Recently I was commuting on one of the roads of Bangalore which also had a flyover wing attached to it. I was in the autorikshaw and the driver suddenly climbed the flyover, I was actually supposed to take the road and not the flyover. It took me a while to realize that I was not on the road but on the flyover. I asked the him, why did he do that and mislead me? He said, “No madam, this goes to the same place, and no tension of traffic jam”. I felt like a fool and kept my mouth shut and left him to lead.

I really felt that I was truly on the ’superhighway’ without traffic and reaching my destination probably 10-15 minutes earlier, or may be even 30 minutes, you know about traffic jams,

I could relate this incident to our day to day life. We are so unaware of the resources that we have, and simply keep doing something that we are already familiar with, rather than exploring a new way, especially in our work places. We do hit a road block, but still continue to do the same, simply because we cannot find a new way of dealing with the situation.

I came across a strange instance while I was working on a recent project of mine. We were a group of 3 people and all good team members. While at lunch, we were the perfect 3 idiots, but when it came to our project, we just failed to be on the same page at the same time. This caused us to loose a lot of time in reviews, discussing the same points again and again, and reorienting from scratch. I really thought we were the best knowledge workers around - all up to date in technology, gadget freaks and good social networking. Just could not figure out what was going wrong, until one day we sat down and thrashed it out. We realized that we did follow the best practices for project management, had the know-how, but just missed those little details which actually had the potential to give the project a new dimension or the required fillip.

Why did that happen, we felt? I thought, because we were not able to capture those thoughts or reactions of ours, which we felt were quite informal or off the records when the project was concerned. But guess what, that was the crux of the matter. Then we started sticking copious remarks on each others notepads, which we soon realized that we will end up something like this -

Soon we realized that we should start leveraging the technology that is available to us - the internet - where we have everything when we want and, isn’t a bother when we don’t. We wanted a tool which could help us collaborate quickly, give our individual inputs, while working together as a team. And guess what, we did crack it, we figured out that there’s not one but quite a few. It was truly an amazing experience, to see how we were just a few days back struggling to get things done and, the next instance, just in no time to have all information stored in one single place and even communicate in a better way.

This experience just took me back to my autorickshaw ride. The flyover ’superhighway’ was just there, but the only difference was that I had not explored it and just had a thought in my own mind(block) that it does not lead to where I want; the journey is sometimes better if we are lead.

It made me just wonder, how powerful could internet be?

Then was that the ‘information superhighway’ which was talked about in 1990s that bridged geographies, but is this, the one now, which is even real-time.

I worked for a large IT organization for a decade, and every single day I said to myself I need a better work life balance and also a ‘better life balance‘ !! When I told my manager I wanted to take work home, most of them smiled and assumed that I wanted to take more work!! I would wait for opportunities and forums to explain how employers can help strike a right balance when nothing is more important than life. I was not willing to spend an extra second @ work…so, I came to a conclusion that I am not designed to work like a machine resulting in poor health and lower morale.

Fortunately times have changed, I found a new job with a negotiation on my work hours. While I continue to work in an IT organization with higher responsibilities, I noticed a new change in the way I did my day to day work to achieve maximum output in limited hours. No, I was not given any training on this, I just followed the key trends to work smartly. Some tips that will come handy to get more work done in less time – Self branding: Generate ideas , it takes the least time but more thinking, and most valued by employer than hours put in. This will build you a lot of credibility with in your organization. Make use of social media – Web is truly information packed now, you can play around and get every piece of information you need easily. Use social media /collaboration tools extensively to organize your work, improve communication, collaborative approach to team work .Collaboration tools and techniques facilitate work from anywhere any time thus reducing your physical presence @ office

Become a web worker – Keep web in mind all the time, change your approach to emails. This will help stay on top of happenings inside your network /organization. Agile portfolioManagement- FollowAgile development processes for better collaboration, innovation, and results.

Work and work place continues to evolve in the coming years beyond recognition which will allow every individual to give the best …before I signing off i want you to watch this video ..you might find it interesting …

I liked email campaign being run on selecting a new national animal for India. Got me engaged. It is a wake up call for the fact that India now has been left with 1000+ tigers in the wild and that will diminish very soon if nothing is done.  I was talking to some of my colleagues who are more knowledgeable in this field and they tell me that this is due to lack of awareness combined with absence of laws against poaching and lack of funds. Definitely need for a community action and we should bring passion for Tiger conservation to the level say cricket in India. I would want my kids to enjoy the tiger reserves in India as I have and not just visit the zoos in future.

As I watching the debate of US Presidential candidates on CNN one thing which amazed me was the complimentary support which the online channels like Blogs, Online Polls, Emails, Chats etc, were provided to the TV anchors and the analysts, ultimately making the program much more richer and enjoyable. I thought of collecting various articles and interesting stuff on this subject and posting on this blog. My belief is the that collective action by various groups for their candidates online will cause a major shift on how elections are run and won in future in the various democracies of the world. Here are some interesting articles:

• Crowdsourcing the elections
• Facebook and US elections
• YouTube debate changes the rules

Ajay, who visited our booth in Startup City event which was held at Nimhans Convention Centre, Bangalore came with a unique issue of having stopped logging into his email account due to the overwhelming amount of emails that he was getting from his friends and colleagues, apart from spam. He said I cannot make sense of all the email in my inbox, and though I used filters and have strongly reported spam, there is no solution.

Ajay did not want to create another email account, and was exploring other options. When he visited Injoos stall, he was kind of surprised to see a lot of Post It’s stuck in the stall. He asked us why the Post It’s were there. We said it was to show the User Generated Content Model.

For the next 30 mintues, he almost grilled us about all the problems that’s there in the internet. One of his main concern was he could not group and switch his behaviour according to the identity he had. “My identity as a friend, a brother, a son, a photography and nature loving enthusiast are all mixed up in my inbox, and it’s getting complicated to be contextually in touch with my identity, like I do in the real-world,” Ajay said.

Then we took time to explain about how he can maintain all his separate identities in Injoos, and be himself. The identity-based groups of Injoos on a single-login (that’s another feature I’ll speak about in my next blog), is a key solution for the real-world identities to online. The relevant and trusted information flow
amongst the group members from trusted source is an answer to today’s information overload problem.

Ajay went on to create his Injoos account, ofcourse, after that 30 minutes of “discussion.” After a few days I got a call and he said, “you know what, I don’t say I have all my information overload problem solved, but you guys have thought about people like us.” He went on to tell me how he was able to have switch between his identities that are separate, with the relevant information from people whom he wants being available. That’s what Injoos does. Provide you the local, relevant information from your trusted source.

Click here to create your account and find some solution to the Information overload problem.