We talked about the recent resource actions at IBM and other companies, and how people were reaching out to their networks to find other opportunities. JF Arsenault (one of my role models) tweeted his availability and blogged about the situation. Others are reaching out to non-Web-2.0 networks, calling and e-mailing people. In tough times, we need all the help we can get.

David observed that being part of a resource action–being laid off, in less euphemistic terms–used to carry more of a stigma. But in an economic climate where even top performers are part of resource actions, it’s not about individuals. If it’s not shameful to be looking for an opportunity and you’re the kind of person for whom sharing things online, it makes sense to reach out to the widest networks you have. You may even have an advantage: you’ve cultivated a wide network, established your credibility both inside and outside the company, and can find out about opportunities you might not otherwise have come across.

One of the interesting consequences of this recession and reshuffling, then, is that the shake-out may give us more insights on what works in the marketplace. Does it make sense to hoard your knowledge so that you are valued more? Does it make sense to share your knowledge so that you gain more leverage on it, create and share more value, and grow your network?

From personal experiences such as regularly getting calls from headhunters because they’ve read my blog (which I always reply to with a variation of “I’m really happy at IBM because I’m doing all sorts of awesome stuff with awesome people, but thanks for connecting!”), I suspect that sharing knowledge opens up far more opportunities than it closes.

It’s difficult for people to switch paradigms. Through evangelism and coaching, I help people who are interested in sharing learn how to share more effectively. Through examples, I hope to inspire people to reexamine their assumptions about knowledge and power, and to try sharing what they know and what they’re learning. If people are afraid of losing their job, they’ll probably find it even more difficult to invest extra time in sharing what they know. Sharing seems slow. But if those who have invested the time to share their knowledge start seeing clear benefits during these uncertain times, then maybe more people will consider sharing.

We’ll see what it’s like when the dust settles. I think, however, that investing in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 – whether at the organizational or personal level – makes even more sense now than it did it easier times. If you’d like to learn more about getting started, leave a comment. I may not be able to spend as much time doing one-on-one coaching as I’d like, but maybe I can share some lessons learned that’ll help you and lots of other people. You can also pick not only my brain but also my teammates’ brains by engaging us for consulting or application development for your organization. I think we can get through these challenging times, and I think it’s a great opportunity to find out what works.

(Also, check out Joe McKendrick’s blog post on investing in Web 2.0)

The book crystallized some nagging doubts I’d had for a while. Many companies – mine included – often optimistically count on a generation of digital natives–Generation Y–to power the organizational changes that required to fully take advantage of the collaborative technologies lumped together under Enterprise 2.0. After all, we grew up connecting, collaborating, and sharing on the Internet. We demand intranet technologies at par with the powerful and easy-to-use consumer tools we can’t imagine living without. We ignore organizational and geographic boundaries. We’ve been helping people figure out VCRs and laptops since we were kids. We’re going to help your company get the hang of blogs and wikis, too. Right? Right?

Sure, I’ve seen a bit of that in practice. My Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work has been viewed more than 25,000 times. I’ve set up numerous wikis for groups who were curious about the technology but who needed a little extra help getting started. I’ve coached many Baby Boomers and Generation Xers on how to start a blog and use it for professional success. I’ve facilitated workshops helping our clients figure out Web 2.0, Generation Y as consumers and as employees, and how they can evolve their business strategies to take these new realities into account. I hear plenty of stories–both inside and outside IBM–of how younger employees are trying to help their teams or organizations learn about and adopt the tools.

But it’s not easy.

Generation Blend has excellent analyses of how adoption of a new tool and its corresponding process can stall due to technology anxiety. When unfamiliar technologies are coupled with generational gaps and authority issues, the politics can outweigh the benefits. If you’re an experienced Baby Boomer struggling with the needs of the changing business environment on top of your heavy workload, you don’t need a young upstart with little experience telling you to try out this unfamiliar tool.

Enterprise 2.0 transformation might even be more difficult if it seems to be associated with youth. Generation Blend points out that advertising campaigns typically link technology with youth, which contributes to the anxiety older generations feel about technology. And in most cases, young employees have neither the credibility nor the authority to lead change. (According to True Change (Janice Klein, 2004), experienced hires are much more likely to influence change.)

So don’t count on us to change your culture. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers need to do most of the heavy lifting.

I’ve known this for a while. I do a lot of internal technology evangelism at IBM, and I’m often asked to speak to groups because my enthusiasm is infectious. I can handle people’s concerns while encouraging them to explore the possibilities. But whenever I can, I try to refer the organizers of the talk to evangelists or budding evangelists who share many things in common with the target audience. Instead of evangelizing directly, I focus on providing evangelists with tools and resources. Yes, people will appreciate my enthusiasm, but true change happens when they take those ideas into their everyday lives. As Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore) and other books about innovation diffusion have noted, modeling someone whose day-to-day work is similar to theirs will be much more effective, in the long run. By organizing and documenting our collective knowledge, exploring new opportunities, and inspiring people through what I share and what I do, I make full use of my strengths as a Gen Yer who’s learned so much about Enterprise 2.0 in the last three years that I’ve been researching or using it.

So if Generation Y can’t be your primary evangelists for Enterprise 2.0, how can we help your organization transform? Here’s what we can be good at:

• Bringing in new ideas – We’re exposed to a lot of different ideas, and we haven’t (usually) settled on the One Way To Do Things. Tap us for creative thinking in combination with people who bring more depth and experience to the table. My team members ask me to help during our clients’ strategic planning workshops because they know I’ll come up with tons of ideas.
• Challenging assumptions – We do things differently, and that gives everyone opportunities to re-examine what people take for granted. Many people have told me that the way I share what I’m learning has caused them to reevaluate their assumption that knowledge is power and that you should keep it secret. I show that knowledge shared is power, too. One of the most valuable ways I contribute to IBM and to our clients is to show what’s possible, simply by acting as if the Enterprise 2.0 organization already existed.
• Learning – Everything’s new to us, and we’re learning so much. We also recognize the need to build our reputation and our network, and sharing knowledge is the best way we know – but it should be associated with us, not just archived in a knowledge repository. If you can capture some of that energy with wikis, blogs, or a peer-to-peer learning solution, you’ll probably get far more growth and knowledge-sharing than you would if you bombarded your subject-matter experts with directives to share what they know through wikis and blogs.

If you want to help people in your organization connect and collaborate more effectively using Enterprise 2.0 tools, don’t leave it to Gen Y. Involve us, engage us, and support us. Connect us with opportunities to make a difference. But don’t make Enterprise 2.0 a generational issue, because the contributions of the Baby Boomers and the Gen Xers in your organization are probably going to make a much bigger difference and you won’t be able to engage them if you draw those generational lines. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, leave a comment or e-mail me your questions, or check out these other interesting resources:

Interesting reading:

• Generation Blend, book and blog
• Crossing the Chasm, book
• True Change, book
• Grown Up Digital, book
• Can Millennials Really Change the Work Place, blog entry, Tom Davenport
• The millennial organisation, blog entry, Mark Gould
• Net Gen Nonsense, blog

If you are wondering where you fall in this division, here are the boundaries:

• Traditionalists, born between 1900 and 1945;
• Baby Boomers, born 1946 to 1964;
• Gen-Xers, 1965-1980;
• Millennials, or NetGens, born after 1980

I liked the way the table above summarized the generational differences the first time I saw it, to the point I asked a colleague to re-use it in my current engagement. But when I proposed to add this table to the material I’m developing – part of a collaboration strategy for a very large government agency – I had an enlightening conversation with the folks I’m working with, both of them boomers and brilliant.

I don’t buy this. When I was 18, I was very much like the NetGen described in this table. The behaviours described here have a lot to do with personal traits and lifecycle. Today’s NetGens, once they get married, start a family and get a mortgage, may become more settled and act pretty much like a boomer. Besides, there are young folks today that are uncomfortable with change, thrive under hierarchical structures and prefer things to be run the "conventional" way.

Disclaimer: The above is my recollection of what 2 people said, which can be very different from what they actually said, so take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m inclined now to think that the table above is VERY ageist, and it’s not helping us to actually understand the differences between people.

Our brain likes generalizations. It helps us to create a simple model of how life works and simplifies our decision making. But generalizations are typically based on perceived averages. And there is no such a thing as the average person, the average Asian, or the average woman. You probably have seen one of the multiple incarnations of "if the world were a village of 100 people" (see here & here for more details). The hypothetical average human being would be Asian, adult, heterosexual, Christian, always hungry and with no TV at home. I would bet that the vast majority of the human population does not fit that full profile, even though those are the dominant attributes in each category. Those attributes are independent variables, they don’t come in bundles.

There’s a Brazilian song that says something along the lines of "looking from a close range, nobody is normal" ("de perto ninguém é normal", Vaca Profana, Caetano Veloso, if you need to know). That’s so much true! Just imagine the table above trying to do the same with gender, race, or sexual preferences. You would probably think that to be very inappropriate or stereotypical. One of the things that make humanity fascinating is exactly how complex and different we are. Nobody is "one in a million". There was never a person like you, and there will never be. We are all truly unique, each one of us a long tail of our own. So please don’t tell me that you are too old to blog or that you "get" technology just because you are supposed to be a NetGen. There’s nothing like living in exponential times: the only thing you are supposed to be is yourself.

First of all, even though early entrants do benefit from garnering mindshare as innovative and bold, there are several cases of late entrants who were able to level the competition by offering a superior service. Both Google over Yahoo search and Facebook over MySpace come to mind, but there are several other notable examples.

So let’s suppose you’ve been late to the 2.0 game but now wants to try it out. What can you do to get an edge over your competitors? In other words, how can you obtain, in MBA lingo, a Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA)? A SCA happens when a firm "has value-creating processes and positions that cannot be duplicated or imitated by other firms that lead to the production of above normal rents" (Wikipedia). If you read the whole article (which is not that well written, by the way), you’ll find that, to be sustainable, your advantage has to be distinctive and proprietary.

Knowing that, three of your resources come to mind:

1. Your people (employees, business partners and customers)
2. Your data
3. Your products and services

People is the most overlooked of the three. Most companies claim things along the lines of "our customer always comes first", "our people is our most valuable asset" and "you can trust the excellence of our business partners". Talk is that cheap. Very few act on it.

Your employees

The executives in your company, individually speaking, may be among the brightest business people in the world. They’ve been through it all, seen it all, have powerful incentives to make your company do really well. But nobody really knows your business as much as the collective intelligence of all your employees. The teller in that remote city in Wisconsin knows that you just lost a loyal customer because you started charging too much for a cheque book, or because your company was rumoured to be exposed to a serious security breach. Your fast-food cashier knows that charging 50 cents for having a small salad instead of fries in your combo made 3 clients cancel their orders this week. That information can be trivial and inconsequent. Those employees may not even think about those things that much. If we want to be fancy, we can call all that tacit knowledge, which is typically deemed as hard to access. So, why bother?

Well, Web 2.0 is changing that. Knowledge that was only registered in people’s minds or oral conversations are increasingly becoming digitalized in blog posts, tweets, comments, text messages, VoIP conversations, call centre recordings, YouTube videos, you name it. Now, if the only channel your employees have to express themselves is the corporate email and the conversation at the cafeteria, you’re missing all that. The chart below shows that email and other traditional communication tools fall short in both reach and breadth of content. Using blogs, wikis and enterprise social networking tools can really amplify and strengthen the networks you develop at work, and will capture a fair amount of tacit knowledge that would otherwise be lost. You’ll also be able to reach out to the "invisible majority", people that you should care about and never have a chance to listen to (represented in white in the diagram below).

Many companies are afraid of giving employees an internal corporate blogging platform because that could be used as a space to vent frustration and rant about all sorts of things. Don’t be afraid. Rest assured that both venting and ranting WILL happen. And that’s a good thing for you, as you do want to learn what the major causes of dissatisfaction may be. Well, unless mistreating your employees IS part of your business model. But over time you’ll see that people complaining is not going to be the major theme there. Some folks will tell stories, others will share their knowledge or come up with new ideas. As the community matures, that may be even an added incentive for your employees to stick with your company, as the sense of belonging tends to be strengthened during this process.

Guidelines

Make sure you establish reasonable guidelines for what is OK, and revisit the guidelines from time to time to ensure they stay current and relevant. Also, don’t enforce guidelines as if you were the police. Do it as if you were a parent. People will occasionally post content that will challenge some of the guidelines. Unless it’s blatantly inappropriate, you may be better off leaving it there for a while, for the community to make a judgement. Sometimes breaking a guideline says more about the guideline than about the violator, and guidelines are supposed to evolve with the maturity of the blogging community.

Business partners

Some companies are also creating communities with their business partners, field agents or prosumers. Even though these folks are not part of your payroll, they want you to succeed, and listening to what they have to say can give you a perspective you cannot get from inside. More companies should be doing this in the next few years, opening their collaboration environment to trusted partners.

Customers

Finally, the scariest space of them all: let your customers say, in a public forum, what they think about you, your products and services. You actually should beg for people to comment on those. The more people do it, the less skewed your sample will be. Again, don’t be scared to give up control here. You’ve lost that years ago. If you are a large company or have a best seller product or service, try this simple test. Google your company’s name, and look for related Wikipedia or blog entries. You probably don’t need to go beyond the second page of results to find people speaking about you already. If you are really large, chances are that you’ll even find a <your-company-name>Sucks.com website.

So the bad news is that  the genie is out of the bottle already, you can’t control what people say anymore. The good news is that your competitor’s genie is also out there, so it’s a fair playing field for those who understand the game. I highly recommend you visit Mike Moran’s website for more on that (full disclosure: like me, he also works for IBM).

Done in the right way, this is a very hard capability for others to copy, as your people are truly unique and their contributions cannot be easily replicated.

Stay tuned as I’ll be addressing the other two resources – data and products + services – in a future post.

One of the difficult things about introducing enterprise social computing is that culture plays such a large role. Here’s what Charles Jeter describes on his blog:

I think it depends a lot on the type of corporate structure; to be blunt about it a hostile work environment rewards innovative and individual thought destructively and can jeopardize someone’s position. Having a wiki, which tracks good ideas openly, may endanger those free-thinking people without them even realizing it.

Charles Jeter, CharlesJeter.com » How Wikipedia Works (Or Doesn’t) | Can Corporations Use Wikis?
via Stuart Mader, wikipatterns.com » Why I respectfully disagree with Charles Jeter

Corporate culture isn’t something you can change in a few months. You can’t install goodwill. You can’t enable cooperation. But your company believes that this is the way to go in the long run, how can you start changing its culture?

One way is to find and support networks of people who value collaboration, either by connecting people across the organization or by gradually hiring more people who believe in collaboration. A company can then help spread the lessons learned from those groups to the rest of the company. Stories are important in spreading cultural change. Through the stories that the company tells about the people it prizes, the company shows what it values. Here are some related books:

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative by Stephen Denning Read more about this book…

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler Read more about this book…

This is by no means a quick or straight-forward process, but a collaborative culture must be in place –even if only in some pockets–for blogs and wikis to take root. Even then, some people will resist sharing. This is understandable. Reach out to all the people who want to share, and perhaps influence those who are ambivalent by showing them how they can personally benefit from these tools.