Author Archives: Hindol Datta
JuggleStars launched! Great Application for Employee Recognition.
About JuggleStars www.jugglestars.com
Please support Jugglestars. This is an Alpha Release. Use the application in your organization. The Jugglestars team will be adding in more features over the next few months. Give them your feedback. They are an awesome team with great ideas. Please click on www.jugglestars.com and you can open an account, go to Account Settings and setup your profile and then you are pretty much ready to go to recognize your team and your colleagues at a project level.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
– Rabindranath Tagore
Among the many fundamental debates in philosophy, one of the fundamental debates has been around the concept of free will. The debates have stemmed around two arguments associated with free will.
1) Since future actions are governed by the circumstances of the present and the past, human beings future actions are predetermined on account of the learnings from the past. Hence, the actions that happen are not truly a consequent of free will.
2) The counter-argument is that future actions may not necessarily be determined and governed by the legacy of the present and the past, and hence leaves headroom for the individual to exercise free will.
Now one may wonder what determinism or lack of it has anything to do with the current state of things in an organizational context. How is this relevant? Why are the abstract notions of determinism and free will important enough to be considered in the context of organizational evolution? How does the meaning lend itself to structured institutions like business organizations, if you will, whose sole purpose is to create products and services to meet the market demand.
So we will throw a factual wrinkle in this line of thought. We will introduce now an element of chance. How does chance change the entire dialectic? Simply because chance is an unforeseen and random event that may not be pre-determined; in fact, a chance event may not have a causal trigger. And chance or luck could be meaningful enough to untether an organization and its folks to explore alternative paths. It is how the organization and the people are aligned to take advantage of that random nondeterministic future that could make a huge difference to the long term fate of the organization.
The principle of inductive logic states that what is true for n and n+1 would be true for n+2. The inductive logic creates predictability and hence organizations create pathways to exploit the logical extension of inductive logic. It is the most logical apparatus that exists to advance groups in a stable but robust manner to address the multitude of challenges that that they have to grapple with. After all, the market is governed by animal spirits! But let us think through this very carefully. All competition or collaboration that occurs among groups to address the market demands result in homogenous behavior with general homogeneous outcomes. Simply put, products and services become commoditized. Their variance is not unique and distinctive. However, they could be just be distinctive enough to eke out enough profits in the margins before being absorbed into a bigger whole. At that point, identity is effaced over time. Organizations gravitate to a singularity. Unique value propositions wane over time.
So let us circle back to chance. Chance is our hope to create divergence. Chance is the factoid that cancels out the inductive vector of industrial organization. Chance does not exist … it is not a “waiting for Godot” metaphor around the corner. If it always did, it would have been imputed by the determinists in their inductive world and we would end up with a dystopian homogenous future. Chance happens. And sometimes it has a very short half-life. And if the organization and people are aligned and their mindset is adapted toward embracing and exploiting that fleeting factoid of chance, the consequences could be huge. New models would emerge, new divergent paths would be traduced and society and markets would burst into a garden of colorful ideas in virtual oasis of new markets.
So now to tie this all to free will and to the unbearable lightness of being! It is the existence of chance that creates the opportunity to exercise free will on the part of an individual, but it is the organizations responsibility to allow the individual to unharness themselves from organization inertia. Thus, organizations have to perpetuate an environment wherein employees are afforded some headroom to break away. And I don’t mean break away as in people leaving the organization to do their own gigs; I mean breakaway in thought and action within the boundaries of the organization to be open to element of chance and exploit it. Great organizations do not just encourage the lightness of being … unharnessing the talent but rather – the great organizations are the ones that make the lightness of being unbearable. These individuals are left with nothing but an awareness and openness to chance to create incredible values … far more incredible and awe inspiring and momentous than a more serene state of general business as usual affairs.
Importance of Heroes and Narratives in Organizations
“My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results… but it is the effort that’s heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.” – George Martin
“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.” – Neil Gaiman
Heroes are not born. Circumstance and happenstance create heroes. In some cases, heroes are individuals who walk into a minefield of uncertainty that threatens their natural inclination for self-preservation in the interest of value systems and people that are alien to the individual. Thus, a private in an army is a hero already in the fact that he/she is walking into possible harm’s way and serving a cause to serve and protect people not necessarily related to him/her. One has heard the adage – one man’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. Thus, someone whom we call a terrorist may be perceived a hero by someone else. Thus, in this case …it all becomes a matter of a point of view, but the fundamental point remains – a hero is considered a person who abnegates and abjures their rights to self-preservation for some greater perceived good.
Sustaining innovation is a vital yet difficult task. Innovation requires the coordinated efforts of many actors to facilitate (1) the recombination of ideas to generate novelty, (2) real-time problem solving, and (3) linkages between present innovation efforts with past experiences and future aspirations. Innovation narratives are cultural mechanisms that address these coordination requirements by enabling translation. Specifically, innovation narratives are powerful mechanisms for translating ideas across the organization so that they are comprehensible and appear legitimate to others. Narratives also enable people to translate emergent situations that are ambiguous or equivocal so as to promote real-time problem solving. With their accumulation, innovation narratives provide a generative memory for organizations that enable people to translate ideas accumulated from particular instances of past innovation to inform current and future efforts.
The concept of collective identity has gained prominence within organizational theory as researchers have studied how it consequentially shapes organizational behavior. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how nascent collective identities become legitimated. Although it is conventionally argued that membership expansion leads to collective identity legitimacy, one draws on the notion of cultural entrepreneurship to argue that the relationship is more complex and is culturally mediated by the stories told by group members. Legitimacy is more likely to be achieved when members articulate a clear defining collective identity story that identifies the group’s orienting purpose and core practices. Although membership expansion can undermine legitimation by introducing discrepant actors and practices to a collective identity, this potential downside is mitigated by compelling narratives, which help to coordinate expansion. And that is where the heroes can be interwoven into organizational theory and behavior. It is important to create environments that by happenstance and circumstance create heroes. The architecture of great organizations imputes heroes and narratives in their tapestry.
Heroes and narratives are instrumental in organizations that forge a pathway to long-term sustenance and growth. Hence, we are quick to idolize figures – Iacocca, Welch, Jobs, Ellison, Gates, Benioff, Gerstner, Branson, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, etc. We learn narratives through case studies, news print, scholarly books on successful companies; and we emulate and steal and copy and parody and so much more … not necessarily because we want to be them but we want to create our identity in our own lair in ecosystems that move with or against the strongest currents.
So it is essential to celebrate the heroes and the narratives of great companies as an additional instrument to ignite engagement and foray into uncharted territories and conquer the unknown. Hence, personally I have also found solace in reading biographies of people who have made a difference, and a great pleasure in vicariously living through the ebbs and troughs of great companies
Forget Style…Choose Substance
(Guest Post from Seth McColley)
Six sentences.
That was all it took to make my week.
Last week, I received a note, via LinkedIn, from a guy that I worked with several years and two employers ago. Nothing deep. Nothing profound. Just a simple note asking me how I was doing, giving me a brief update on his end and then this…
“Thank you for being a positive influence and “stand up guy”. I have fond memories of our working relationship.”
I literally have not heard from this guy for years, so this note was an unexpected gift and a welcome surprise.
Those two simple sentences made an impact. Maybe it was the timing, maybe it was the relationship, maybe it was the memories of what we had endured together, but it hit me in a way that I certainly was not expecting. Sure I had a good working relationship with this guy. He was a Sales Manager and I was his HR Business Partner. We didn’t always see eye to eye and butted heads more than a few times, but at the end of the day we were both doing our part to manage and develop talent, grow sales and move the organization forward. Two simple sentences, but it gave me an incredible shot of encouragement to end the week.
How many times have you thought about reaching out to that old boss, a former peer, an employee you hired years ago, just to say ‘hello’, rattle their cage, find out how they’re doing or just tell them how much you appreciate them? Why do we sometimes feel that our words are not enough and that our gestures must be grander and greater? Our words are more powerful than we think and they carry more weight than we give them credit for. Never underestimate the power of your own words.
Now, this isn’t a post meant to encourage you to go tell those you love that you love them, because any day could be your last (although, it’s not a bad idea). But rather, it’s a simple reminder that recognition and praise can come in the simplest forms. Sometimes we spend so much time and energy “dressing up” recognition that it comes across as unauthentic, fake, pretentious and ill-timed that it just misses the mark. We choose style over substance.
Case in point…
I’d like to encourage you to reach out to one person this week and thank them for something. Let someone know that they’ve made a difference. Just one. My hope is that you’ll be able to make the kind of impact that this person had on me last week. Forget style…choose substance.
Reality Distortion Field: A Powerful Motivator in Organizations!
“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently. “
– Andy Hertzfield on Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field.
Many of us have heard the word – Reality Distortion Field. The term has been attributed to Steve Jobs who was widely known to have communicated messages to his constituency in a manner such that the reality of the situation was supplanted by him packaging the message so that people would take the bait and pursue paths that would, upon closer investigation, be dissonant from reality. But having been an avid acolyte of Jobs, I would imagine that he himself would be disturbed and unsettled by the label. Since when did the promise of a radiant future constitute a Reality Distortion Field? Since when did the ability of a person to embrace what seemingly is impossible and far-fetched and instill confidence in the troops to achieve it constitute a Reality Distortion Field? Since when did the ability of leadership to share in the wonders of unique and disruptive creations constitute a Reality Distortion Field? Since when did dreams of a better future underpinned with executable actions to achieve it constitute a Reality Distortion Field?
The Reality Distortion Field usage reflects the dissonance between what is and what needs to be. It is a slapstick term which suggests that you are envisioning tectonic dissonance rifts between reality and possibilities and that you are leading the awestruck starry-eyed followers off a potential cliff. Some people have renamed RDF as hype of Bulls*#t. They believe that RDF is extremely bad for organizations because it pushes the people outside the comfort zone of physical and logical constraints and is a recipe for disaster. The argument continues that organizations that are grounded upon the construct of reality and to communicate the same are essential to advance the organization. I beg to differ.
So let me address this on two fronts: RDF label and if we truly accept what RDF means … then my position is that it is the single most important attribute that a strong leader ought to embrace in the organization.
The RDF label:
We all know this to be true: A rose by any other name is still a rose. We just happen to call this rose in this context a RDF. It is presumed to be the ability of a person to cast possibilities in a different light … so much so that the impossibilities are reduced to elements just within the grasp of reality. Now I ask you – What is wrong with that? For a leader to be able to cast their vision within the inimitable grasp of an organization is a huge proxy for the faith of the leader of the people in the organization. If a project realistically would take 3 months but a RDF is cast to get a project done in 15 days – that is a tall order – but think of the consequences if people are “seduced” into the RDF and hence acts upon it. It immediately unfolds new pathways of collaboration, unforeseen discoveries into super-efficient and effective methods, it creates trench camaraderie, it distills focus into singularity points to be executed against, it instills and ignites a passion and an engagement around the new stakes in the ground, people become keepers of one another for a consequential and significant conquest, it brings out the creative energies and the limitless possibilities, once the goal is accomplished, of disruptive innovation in means and ends. Of course, one could also counter-argue a plethora of incidental issues in such cases: employees would burn out under the burden of unrealistic goals, employees are set more for failing than succeeding, it would create a disorderly orientation upon groups working together to meet RDF standards, and if one were to fall short …it would be a last straw that may break the camel’s back. So essentially this speaks to the ordinal magnitude of the RDF schema that is being pushed out by leadership.
RDF and the beneficial impact to an organization:
It is the sine qua non of great leadership to be able to push organizations beyond the boundaries of plain convenience. I have, in my career, been fortunate to have been challenged and on many occasions, forced out of my comfort zone. But in having done so successfully on many occasions, it has also given me the confidence to scale mountains. And that confidence is a perquisite that the organization leadership has to provide on a daily basis. After all, one of the biggest assets that an employee in an organization ought to have is pride and sense of accomplishment to their work. RDF unfolds that possibility.
We hear of disruptive innovations. These are defined as innovations that leapfrog the bounds of technology inertia. How does a company enable that? It is certainly not incremental thinking. It is a vision that marginally lies outside our aggregated horizon of sight. The age today which is a result of path breaking ideas and execution have been a result of those visionaries that have aimed beyond the horizons, instilled faith amongst the line men to align and execute, and made the impossible possible. We ought to thank our stars for having leaders that emit an RDF and lead us off our tenebrous existence in our diurnal professional lives.
There is absolutely no doubt that such leadership would create resistance and fierce antipathy among some. But despite some of the ill effects, the vector that drives great innovations lies in the capacity of the organization to embrace degrees of RDF to hasten and make the organizations competitive, distinctive and powerful.
The Political Campaign Juggernaut – What Obamney campaigns can teach Organizations!
The Presidential election is tomorrow. I shall not disclose my position, but I am a San Francisco/Bay Area Native. Any doubts who I most likely am inclined toward? Most likely not! But the campaign throughout the year got me thinking. Imagine … over $1.3B have been spent to either bash someone or to send a message out. Over $1.3B! I do not have the actual numbers, but what I do know is that about $1B was spent in 2008 and it is estimated that the total spend was at least 30% more for the 2012 campaign. That makes it one of the biggest annual marketing budgets. To put it in context, that is almost 50% more than what Apple spent on advertising in 2011 ($933M).
We are expecting about 100M people to vote. 100M people to give a like for either party. Now look at it this way. $1.3B suggests that the total presidential campaign budget would translate to over 400M clicks (assuming $3 per click) or over 650 billion impressions (assuming $2 per 1000 impressions). Of course, that is not actually the case because there is payroll, organization expenses, etc, etc, etc. But you get the point. It is a big big budget … and it is one of the very few budgets that tend to be managed very well. Despite the largesse, it does not take into account the volunteer base that goes into the campaigns.
Now the outcome associated with political campaigns is fairly concrete. Either you have put the money to good use, hence resulting in the election of the appropriate person or your money spent has not been good enough. Who do you fire? The person who loses either goes moves shop from White House or considers becoming the CEO of the next big thing – perhaps a public equity capital group. Either way, we can take some learnings from all that have transpired and apply it to organizations. Of course, most organizations do not have this massive budget but regardless … they do have substantial marketing budgets and so the question is: What can we learn from what we have seen in the political theater that would enable the organization to shape and landscape the customer and employee mindshare.
Here are a few key points:
1. Pounding the message: Organizations have to be focused on the end goal and ensure at all times that any and all message that is being delivered is being done to attain a set of key objectives that enables organization success. That means that there should be no ambiguity as to what the organization and its brand represents. Dilution of the message may open up pockets of undecided customers or employees that could vote with their wallet and their feet quite readily.
2. Creating advocacy groups: Organizations have to create and nurture product and message evangelists by placing these nodes across many fields where potential customers and employees may come in contact with the organization. That would mean almost all social media channels, offline channels, conferences, elicit testimonials, investor and public relations efforts, timing special news releases etc. Advocacy groups are a proxy for all channels that an organization must leverage.
3. Aspirational Inclinations: Sell a dream! Sell possibilities! Sell the Why Nots! People tend to converge upon a platform of optimism. Yet, organizations must also be able to short their competitor’s offerings or perhaps not mention them at all.
4. Polling the behavior: If you notice, political campaigns have taken a page out of Lean Startup methodology. If polls go haywire …resources and messages are tweaked to create a semblance of stability and to get back to desired radar frequencies. Tweaking of the message and the presence of the messenger becomes important. This is field deployment of solutions associated with what all the data intelligence gathered is telling you.
5. Super PACS and Angel Affiliates: You have limits as do all organizations! No problem! Create evangelists that are not directly on the take. These are folks that will push your culture to the furthest corners of the globe. So recognize them and support them. They carry the torch since they fully believe in your mission and that your organization outcomes will impact them positively. How? Let them know? Drill. Baby. Drilllll the message.
6. Electoral College wins, not popular polls: Focus on the profitable customers; get the very best employees. Stratify your business so that you buy the win. You may not have the most likes but you would have had enough among the strata that truly matters.
7. Give the final reason: Give customers and employees a reason to vote. You want them to vote for you, but all the same you still want them to vote. You want the market of ideas to expand, even though they may serve competing visions in the tapestry of organizations in your space. But in trying to harness the turnout to the polls, you will have done as well as you can to draw them to your mojo.
See you all possible voters in the polls tomorrow. Applaud and keep the flames of democracy alive.
Medici Effect – Encourage Innovation in the Organization
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
– Steve Jobs
What is the Medici Effect?
Frans Johanssen has written a lovely book on the Medici Effect. The term “Medici” relates to the Medici family in Florence that made immense contributions in art, architecture and literature. They were pivotal in catalyzing the Renaissance, and some of the great artists and scientists that we revere today – Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo were commissioned for their works by the family.
Renaissance was the resurgence of the old Athenian democracy. It merged distinctive areas of humanism, philosophy, sciences, arts and literature into a unified body of knowledge that would advance the cause of human civilization. What the Medici effect speaks to is the outcome that is the result of creating a system that would incorporate what on first glance, may seem distinctive and discrete disciplines, into holistic outcomes and a shared simmering of wisdom that permeated the emergence of new disciplines, thoughts and implementations.
Supporting the organization to harness the power of the Medici Effect
We are past the industrial era, the Progressive era and the Information era. There are no formative lines that truly distinguish one era from another, but our knowledge has progressed along gray lines that have pushed the limits of human knowledge. We are now wallowing in a crucible wherein distinct disciplines have crisscrossed and merged together. The key thesis in the Medici effect is that the intersections of these distinctive disciplines enable the birth of new breakthrough ideas and leapfrog innovation.
So how do we introduce the Medici Effect in organizations?
Some of the key ways to implement the model is really to provide the support infrastructure for
1. Connections: Our brains are naturally wired toward associations. We try to associate a concept with contextual elements around that concept to give the concept more meaning. We learn by connecting concepts and associating them, for the most part, with elements that we are conversant in. However, one can create associations within a narrow parameter, constrained within certain semantic models that we have created. Organizations can hence channelize connections by implementing narrow parameters. On the other hand, connections can be far more free-form. That means that the connector thinks beyond the immediate boundaries of their domain or within certain domains that are “pre-ordained”. In those cases, we create what is commonly known as divergent thinking. In that approach, we cull elements from seemingly different areas but we thread them around some core to generate new approaches, new metaphors, and new models. Ensuring that employees are able to safely reach out to other nodes of possibilities is the primary implementation step to generate the Medici effect.
2. Collaborations: Connecting different streams of thought in different disciplines is a primary and formative step. To advance this further, organization need to be able to provide additional systems wherein people can collaborate among themselves. In fact, the collaboration impact accentuates the final outcome sooner. So enabling connections and collaboration work in sync to create what I would call – the network impact on a marketplace of ideas.
3. Learning Organization: Organizations need to continuously add fuel to the ecosystem. In other words, they need to bring in speakers, encourage and invest in training programs, allow exploration possibilities by developing an internal budget for that purpose and provide some time and degree of freedom for people to mull over ideas. This enables collaboration to be enriched within the context of diverse learning.
4. Encourage Cultural Diversity: Finally, organizations have to invest in cultural diversity. People from different cultures have varied viewpoints and information and view issues from different perspectives and cultures. Given the fact that we are more globalized now, the innate understanding and immersion in cultural experience enhances the Medici effect. It also creates innovation and ground-breaking thoughts within a broader scope of compassion, humanism, social and shared responsibilities.
Implementing systems to encourage the Medici effect will enable organizations to break out from legacy behavior and trammel into unguarded territories. The charter toward unknown but exciting possibilities open the gateway for amazing and awesome ideas that engage the employees and enable them to beat a path to the intersection of new ideas.
Transparency in organizations
“We chose steel and extra wide panels of glass, which is almost like crystal. These are honest materials that create the right sense of strength and clarity between old and new, as well as a sense of transparency in the center of the institution that opens the campus up to the street.”
What is Transparency in the context of the organization?
It is the deliberate attempt by management to architect an organization that encourages open access to information, participation, and decision making, which ultimately creates a higher level of trust among the stakeholders.
The demand for transparency is becoming quite common. The users of goods and services are provoking the transparency question:
- Shareholder demand for increased financial accountability in the corporate world,
- Increased media diligence
- Increased regulatory diligence and requirements
- Increased demand by social interest and environmental groups
- Demands to see and check on compliance based on internal and external policies
- Increased employees’ interest in understanding how senior management decisions impact them, the organization and society
There are 2 big categories that organizations must consider and subsequently address while establishing systems in place to promote transparency.
- External Transparency
- Internal Transparency
External Transparency:
Some of the key elements are that organizations have to make the information accessible while also taking into account the risk of divulging too much information, make the information actionable, enable sharing and collaboration, managing risks, and establishing protocols and channels of communication that is open and democratic.
For example, it is important that employees ought to able to trace the integrity, quality, consistency and validity of the information back to the creator. In an open environment, it also unravels the landscape of risks that an organization maybe deliberately taking or may be carrying unknowingly. It bubbles up inappropriate decisions that can be dwelt on collectively by the management and the employees, and thus risks and inappropriateness are considerably mitigated. The other benefit obviously is that it enables too much overlap wherein people spread across the organizations may be doing the same thing in a similar manner. It affords better shared services platform and also encourages knowledge base and domain expertise that employees can tap into.
Internal Transparency:
Organization has to create the structure to encourage people to be transparent. Generally, people come to work with a mask on. What does that mean? Generally, the employees focus on the job at hand but they may be interested to add value in other ways besides their primary responsibility. In fact, they may want to approach their primary responsibility in an ingenious manner that would help the organization. But the mask or the veil that they don separates their personal interest and passions with the obligations that the job demands. Now how cool would it be if the organization sets up a remarkably safe system wherein the distinction between the employees’ personal interest and the primary obligations of the employee materially dissolve? What I bet you would discover would be higher levels of employee engagement. In addressing internal transparency, what the organization would have done is to have successfully mined and surfaced the personal interests of an employee and laid it out among all participants in a manner that would benefit the organization and the employee and their peers.
Thus, it is important to address both – internal and external transparency. However, implementing transparency ethos is not immune to challenges wherein increased transparency may distort intent, slow processes, increase organizational vulnerabilities, create psychological dissonance among employees or groups, create new factions and sometimes even result in poor decisions. Despite the challenges, the aggregate benefit of increased transparency over time would outweigh the costs. At the end, if the organization continues to formalize transparency, it would also simultaneously create and encourage trust and proper norms and mores that would lay the groundwork for an effective workforce.
Reputation is often an organization’s most valuable asset. It is built over time through a focused commitment and response to members’ wants, needs, and expectations. A commitment to transparency will increasingly become a litmus test used to define an association’s reputation and will be used as a value judgment for participation. By gaining a reputation for value through the disclosure of information, extensive communications with stakeholders, and a solid track record of truth and high disclosure of information, associations will win the respect and involvement of current and future members.
Kanter and Fine use a great analogy of transparency like an ocean sponge. These pore bearing organisms let up to twenty thousand times their volume in water pass through them every day. These sponges can withstand open, constant flow without inhibiting it because they are anchored to the ocean floor. Transparent organizations behave like these sponges: anchored to their mission and still allowing people in and out easily. Transparent organizations actually benefit from the constant flow of people and information.
Plans to implement transparency
Businesses are fighting for trust from their intended audiences. Shel Holtz and John Havens, authors of “Tactical Transparency,” state that the realities associated with doing business in today’s “business environment have emerged as the result of recent trends: Declining trust in business as usual and the increased public scrutiny under which companies find themselves thanks to the evolution of social media.” It is important, now more than ever, for organizations to use tools successfully to be sincerely but prudently transparent in ways that matter to their stakeholders.
“Tactical Transparency” adopted the following definition for transparency:
Transparency is the degree to which an organization shares the following with its stakeholder publics:
▪ Its leaders: The leaders of transparent companies are accessible and are straightforward when talking with members of key audiences.
▪ Its employees: Employees or transparent companies are accessible, can reinforce the public view of the company, and able to help people where appropriate.
▪ Its values: Ethical behavior, fair treatment, and other values are on full display in transparent companies.
▪ Its culture: How a company does things is more important today than what it does. The way things are done is not a secret in transparent companies.
▪ The results of its business practices, both good and bad: Successes, failures, problems, and victories all are communicated by transparent companies.
▪ Its business strategy: Of particular importance to the investment community but also of interest to several other audiences, a company’s strategy is a key basis for investment decisions. Misalignment of a company’s strategy and investors’ expectations usually result in disaster.
Here are some great links around transparency.
http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/what-happens-when-transparency-goes-wrong/
According to J.D. Lasica, cofounder of Ourmedia.org and the Social Media Group, there are three levels of transparency that an organization should consider when trying to achieve tactical transparency.
▪ Operational Transparency: That involves creating or following an ethics code, conflict-of-interest policies, and any other guidelines your organization creates.
▪ Transactional Transparency: This type of strategy provides guidelines and boundaries for employees so they can participate in the conversation in and out of the office. Can they have a personal blog that discusses work-related issues?
▪ Lifestyle Transparency: This is personalized information coming from sites like Facebook and Twitter. These channels require constant transparency and authenticity.
Create an Action Plan around policies and circumstances to promote transparency:
Holtz and Havens outline specific situations where tactical transparency can transform a business, some of which are outlined in this list.
▪ Major Crises
▪ Major change initiatives
▪ Product changes
▪ New regulations that will impact business
▪ Financial matters
▪ Media interaction
▪ Employee interaction with the outside world
▪ Corporate Governance
▪ Whistleblower programs
▪ Monitoring corporate reputation internally and externally
▪ Whistleblower programs
▪ Accessibility of management
The Big Data Movement: Importance and Relevance today?
We are entering into a new age wherein we are interested in picking up a finer understanding of relationships between businesses and customers, organizations and employees, products and how they are being used, how different aspects of the business and the organizations connect to produce meaningful and actionable relevant information, etc. We are seeing a lot of data, and the old tools to manage, process and gather insights from the data like spreadsheets, SQL databases, etc., are not scalable to current needs. Thus, Big Data is becoming a framework to approach how to process, store and cope with the reams of data that is being collected.
According to IDC, it is imperative that organizations and IT leaders focus on the ever-increasing volume, variety and velocity of information that forms big data.
- Volume. Many factors contribute to the increase in data volume – transaction-based data stored through the years, text data constantly streaming in from social media, increasing amounts of sensor data being collected, etc. In the past, excessive data volume created a storage issue. But with today’s decreasing storage costs, other issues emerge, including how to determine relevance amidst the large volumes of data and how to create value from data that is relevant.
- Variety. Data today comes in all types of formats – from traditional databases to hierarchical data stores created by end users and OLAP systems, to text documents, email, meter-collected data, video, audio, stock ticker data and financial transactions. By some estimates, 80 percent of an organization’s data is not numeric! But it still must be included in analyses and decision making.
- Velocity. According to Gartner, velocity “means both how fast data is being produced and how fast the data must be processed to meet demand.” RFID tags and smart metering are driving an increasing need to deal with torrents of data in near-real time. Reacting quickly enough to deal with velocity is a challenge to most organizations.
SAS has added two additional dimensions:
- Variability. In addition to the increasing velocities and varieties of data, data flows can be highly inconsistent with periodic peaks. Is something big trending in the social media? Daily, seasonal and event-triggered peak data loads can be challenging to manage – especially with social media involved.
- Complexity. When you deal with huge volumes of data, it comes from multiple sources. It is quite an undertaking to link, match, cleanse and transform data across systems. However, it is necessary to connect and correlate relationships, hierarchies and multiple data linkages or your data can quickly spiral out of control. Data governance can help you determine how disparate data relates to common definitions and how to systematically integrate structured and unstructured data assets to produce high-quality information that is useful, appropriate and up-to-date.
So to reiterate, Big Data is a framework stemming from the realization that the data has gathered significant pace and that it’s growth has exceeded the capacity for an organization to handle, store and analyze the data in a manner that offers meaningful insights into the relationships between data points. I am calling this a framework, unlike other materials that call Big Data a consequent of the inability of organizations to handle mass amounts of data. I refer to Big Data as a framework because it sets the parameters around an organizations’ decision as to when and which tools must be deployed to address the data scalability issues.
Thus to put the appropriate parameters around when an organization must consider Big Data as part of their analytics roadmap in order to understand the patterns of data better, they have to answer the following ten questions:
- What are the different types of data that should be gathered?
- What are the mechanisms that have to be deployed to gather the relevant data?
- How should the data be processed, transformed and stored?
- How do we ensure that there is no single point of failure in data storage and data loss that may compromise data integrity?
- What are the models that have to be used to analyze the data?
- How are the findings of the data to be distributed to relevant parties?
- How do we assure the security of the data that will be distributed?
- What mechanisms do we create to implement feedback against the data to preserve data integrity?
- How do we morph the big data model into new forms that accounts for new patterns to reflect what is meaningful and actionable?
- How do we create a learning path for the big data model framework?
Some of the existing literature have commingled Big Data framework with analytics. In fact, the literature has gone on to make a rather assertive statement i.e. that Big Data and predictive analytics be looked upon in the same vein. Nothing could be further from the truth!
There are several tools available in the market to do predictive analytics against a set of data that may not qualify for the Big Data framework. While I was the CFO at Atari, we deployed business intelligence tools using Microstrategy, and Microstrategy had predictive modules. In my recent past, we had explored SAS and Minitab tools to do predictive analytics. In fact, even Excel can do multivariate, ANOVA and regressions analysis and best curve fit analysis. These analytical techniques have been part of the analytics arsenal for a long time. Different data sizes may need different tools to instantiate relevant predictive analysis. This is a very important point because companies that do not have Big Data ought to seriously reconsider their strategy of what tools and frameworks to use to gather insights. I have known companies that have gone the Big Data route, although all data points ( excuse my pun), even after incorporating capacity and forecasts, suggest that alternative tools are more cost-effective than implementing Big Data solutions. Big Data is not a one-size fit-all model. It is an expensive implementation. However, for the right data size which in this case would be very large data size, Big Data implementation would be extremely beneficial and cost effective in terms of the total cost of ownership.
Areas where Big Data Framework can be applied!
Some areas lend themselves to the application of the Big Data Framework. I have identified broadly four key areas:
- Marketing and Sales: Consumer behavior, marketing campaigns, sales pipelines, conversions, marketing funnels and drop-offs, distribution channels are all areas where Big Data can be applied to gather deeper insights.
- Human Resources: Employee engagement, employee hiring, employee retention, organization knowledge base, impact of cross-functional training, reviews, compensation plans are elements that Big Data can surface. After all, generally over 60% of company resources are invested in HR.
- Production and Operational Environments: Data growth, different types of data appended as the business learns about the consumer, concurrent usage patterns, traffic, web analytics are prime examples.
- Financial Planning and Business Operational Analytics: Predictive analytics around bottoms-up sales, marketing campaigns ROI, customer acquisitions costs, earned media and paid media, margins by SKU’s and distribution channels, operational expenses, portfolio evaluation, risk analysis, etc., are some of the examples in this category.
Hadoop: A Small Note!
Hadoop is becoming a more widely accepted tool in addressing Big Data Needs. It was invented by Google so they could index the structural and text information that they were collecting and present meaningful and actionable results to the users quickly. It was further developed by Yahoo that tweaked Hadoop for enterprise applications.
Hadoop runs on a large number of machines that don’t share memory or disks. The Hadoop software runs on each of these machines. Thus, if you have for example – over 10 gigabytes of data – you take that data and spread that across different machines. Hadoop tracks where all these data resides! The servers or machines are called nodes, and the common logical categories around which the data is disseminated are called clusters. Thus each server operates on its own little piece of the data, and then once the data is processed, the results are delivered to the main client as a unified whole. The method of reducing the disparate sources of information residing in various nodes and clusters into one unified whole is the process of MapReduce, an important mechanism of Hadoop. You will also hear something called Hive which is nothing but a data warehouse. This could be a structured or unstructured warehouse upon which the Hadoop works upon, processes data, enables redundancy across the clusters and offers a unified solution through the MapReduce function.
Personally, I have always been interested in Business Intelligence. I have always considered BI as a stepping stone, in the new age, to be a handy tool to truly understand a business and develop financial and operational models that are fairly close to the trending insights that the data generates. So my ear is always to the ground as I follow the developments in this area … and though I have not implemented a Big Data solution, I have always been and will continue to be interested in seeing its applications in certain contexts and against the various use cases in organizations.
Linked Stars Blog 