My mission statement is:

Pursuing truth and community through technology

Pretty simple, right? This mission statement has three core components that represent exactly what is important to me.

Truth

For me, the ultimate virtue is truth. This has meant different things at different times in my life, but above all, truth to me is a pure, sincere, honest, and objective understanding of how the universe works. My ideas of how the universe works have changed over time, but my fidelity to pursuing why things are the way they are has never wavered. Truth isn’t just a lofty ethereal concept, though. Truth is just as much about the basic metaphysical laws of the universe as it is about how to repair a toaster. Maybe this is just my odd way of justifying what I do for a living, but there is just as much truth in a repair manual for a Xerox machine as there is in the great treatises of Plato, Kierkegaard, or Jung (an odd grouping, I know, but just some examples).

Elucidating the truth about our surroundings, whether that means explaining the power of collective will or teaching someone how to use a piece of software, is one of my core reasons for being.

Community

The second pursuit in my mission statement is community. Yes, I read and demi-worshipped Ayn Rand for most of my life, so I want to make sure I separate  community from collectivism. Community is the non-coercive sharing of resources–the most important of which is ideas. Collectivism is the coercive pooling of resources–usually material. Community is the group of friends who gather every week to watch a TV show, or who share a workspace and bounce ideas off each other. Community is a team of people in a workplace who share a vision and goals and work together to improve a business process. Community is the means by which people can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Technology

The third component of my mission statement is the means by which I pursue community and truth: technology. Sharing ideas about how the world works isn’t something that has sprung out of the earth in the last 5 years. We didn’t need Facebook to get together with friends and share a glass of wine and a business idea. Before Twitter, there were plenty of people who had creative ideas for solving the world’s problems. Jim Collins says that technology is an accelerator, but I prefer to think of it as an amplifier. Technology’s purpose is to is to amplify human endeavor. Instead of sharing an idea for providing clean drinking water to villages in South America with 10 people in a church, technology allows an innovator to share that idea with millions.

What it means

So this is all pretty “up in the ether” kind of stuff. And I am the first to admit that this isn’t the kind of mission statement that one can use as a measuring stick for behavior–it is descriptive, not prescriptive. The simple, three-part statement is a very clear way to describe just what it is that matters to me. It reminds me to stick to what’s important, and line up my energy to pursue that.

The notes are my personal speaking notes, so unless your brain is as crazy as mine, some parts might not quite make sense.

Slide Show

Notes

It is perfectly legitimate, and in fact in the best interest of all involved, to have a clear policy for how to behave when blogging on a company website, tweeting using a company twitter account, or posting on a company Facebook page. These are clearly all actions that you perform as a direct result of your employment with the company and the company has every right to tell you how to behave. Where I have a problem is when these policies attempt to dictate what you can and can’t do on a personal blog, website, social networking site, twitter account, etc. I am pretty sure that the company does not own its employees, as I recall there is a Constitutional Amendment that makes that illegal.

Even Intel, which many see as an example of a progressive company when it comes to employee participation in social media, includes the following in their social media policy:

If you publish to a website outside Intel, please use a disclaimer something like this: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Intel’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

I cannot accept their requirement that employees, on sites that the employees own and operate, take time and energy to put up a disclaimer at Intel’s command. If this is the way Intel views their total hegemony over their employees’ lives, what is to prevent them from demanding that employees post signs at their doors stating “The opinions shared over beers and hot dogs at backyard barbecues are not those of Intel” or, even worse, would Intel forbid their employees from, in their personal capacity, writing letters to the editor about controversial topics such as gay marriage or abortion?

I think this is a classic case of discrimination against new media. Yes, new media and user-generated content can allow ideas to spread more quickly to a wider audience, but it is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. Employees are people with opinions. Whether they express those opinions at a condo association meeting, church prayer group, family picnic, or on a blog, employees have a right to express themselves without the need for an imprimatur from their company’s legal department.

So, as I stewed over the idea of a “write-up” my thought bubble drifted to a similar term, one that I find even more offensive: Insubordination.

Sure, we all hear it. “Well wouldn’t it be insubordination if my employee turns in his paperwork late?” or “Finish that repair or I will write you up for insubordination.” What do we mean by insubordination, though?

The term insubordination has its origins in the highly-regimented, heirarchical leadership structure of the military. Military insubordination is defined by the UMCJ in Article 91 as willfully disobeying the lawful order of a superior. In the context of the military, in which the front line is expected to obey the orders of their superiors without  question, the concept of insubordination might have its place. In a modern workplace, in which collaboration, ideas, and creativity should be fostered and encouraged, it is hard to think of a time in which a person could truly be insubordinate.

For example, let’s say that Susan is an account manager for a technology company. If Susan is told by her boss that a certain report needs to be delivered by Friday, and Susan responds by telling her boss that, because of other business priorities, it is not reasonable for her to have the report completed on such short notice, she is most certainly not being insubordinate. Engaging in a discussion about deadlines, business needs, and prioritizing tasks is an important part of why Susan is in her organization–she is there to add her brainpower to the discussion.

The only way I could Imagine Susan being insubordinate in this example is if she were  to tell her manager “Go to hell. I’m not doing your stupid report and there is nothing you can do about it.” Because insubrdination is such a serious accusation with serious ramifications, it must only be applied to the most serious and extreme circumstances. As I look back at my career, I honestly cannot think of one time that I ever witnessed bona fide insubordination.

The bottom line is that if you need to throw out terms like “insubordination” and “write-up” to get your employees to follow the course that you have set out for your team, then you are doing something wrong. Its okay, we understand. You are probably just doing to your employees what someone once did to you. But you can break the cycle. I would humbly suggest that you read The Leadership Challenge. It is a great book with leadership advice based on solid research.

You don’t have to resort to threats and loaded language to have a successful team.

I ended the call and immediately called my contact at the local distributorship that covered East LA County. As soon as I told him the name of the store, he sighed and  said, “oh he had to go to that store.” You see, there is a sort of loose confederation of Assyrian-owned liquor stores in East LA County who use their own social and family connections to bypass the normal product distribution channels. In this case, the store had written several bad checks to the distributorship, so their account was cancelled. The store owner started obtaining product from friends and relatives who still had accounts to keep his store stocked.

The executive was furious about the condition of the store, but there was absolutely nothing that any of us from the quality control team or the distributorship could do about it. The executive walked into a situation with no context and no understanding of what was going on. All he knew is that he didn’t like the way his brand looked on the shelf. Nothing changed because of the panic he caused.

Power to the People

In most companies, there is some sort of program that attempts to get the executives “working with the people” for a period of time each year. This may involve having a CEO work on the phones in a call center, work in a retail store, or work on a manufacturing line. Any front-line person who has suffered through working alongside an executive in one of these programs can tell you how incredibly disruptive it is. People spend so much time fixing the executive’s mistakes and keeping him out of the way that almost nothing gets done. What is the supposed advantage of this? Executives would say that it helps them find out “what’s really going on” so they can make better decisions. I have to disagree. How does interrupting business, disrupting a location and getting in the way of the workflow help? If executives really wanted to find out what was wrong on the front lines, they would get a lot more from an objective study, or even casual conversations, than they could possibly gain from storming into a work location on a busy day.

What’s Going On Here?

The problem is that many executives don’t seem to understand that their job is strategic, not tactical. Grocery store executives shouldn’t know how to work the cash registers. That isn’t their job. Their job is to decide what information they need from the cash registers to help them make good decisions about the company. Auto company executives shouldn’t know how a car engine is put together. Their job is to make decisions about what types of engines consumers are likely to buy.

When executives get bogged down in minor issues like the conditions of a store in East LA County, they are distracting their attention from the strategic issues that actually matter to the company.

How Can We Help?

The tough thing about bad executive decision-making is that most people feel powerless to do anything about it. If a CEO doesn’t understand the proper scope and perspective of his job, he is certainly not going to look to a lowly peon for advice. However, managers, directors, and vice presidents can strongly influence an executive’s perception of his own job. When making a presentation to executives, focus on the strategic, organization-wide reasoning behind your proposal. Ask the CEO questions that relate to broad, strategic initiatives of the company, instead of asking for an opinion on what color a logo design should be. You can coach up the ladder and set a good example for executives by what you ask the CEO to do.

Tweeting Tech Support

Chris Arkenberg wrote about a recent incident in which he called up AT&T/iPhone support with a question about whether iPhone Twitter apps use SMS to transmit data. He eventually got a hedged non-answer after 15 minutes of waiting, but it got him thinking about how people find answers to questions in business situations. From Chris:

All this had me thinking about the huge inefficiency at play with the responder trying to locate the specialist, get their attention and time, probably juggling multiple phone lines, to then give me one person’s measured response. I imagined a not-too-distant future where the call responder typed my query into a local Twitter-clone running on the tech support network inside AT&T/Apple. This query would immediately push out to subscribers – some required by their manager to subscribe to all tech support feeds, and others who just want to see the problems customers are encountering. I then imagined that some of these subscribers would run search filters on the messaging stream in order to be alerted to those queries they were most interested in tracking.

If a microblogging solution were implemented at AT&T, the post that said “Do Twitter apps use SMS” would have almost certainly been noticed by someone who knew the answer–maybe someone whose formal job is to track the feed, or maybe just an interested coworker in a call center halfway around the world. The person who had the answer to the question could easily post back, and the agent on the phone with Chris could have come to a conclusion about the original problem quickly and efficiently.

How to Fix a Copier

Bypassing the formal, linear process of an organizational hierarchy to get an answer to a simple but unusual question is an everyday occurrence, but is frustrating to corporate types. The people who depend on predictable behavior and outcomes that look good on weekly reports want to make sure that every employee has specific steps to perform for each situation that they come across.

Those of us who live in the real world know that creating a master book of answers to everything is impossible. Researchers who study how people do things at work have found that the informal interactions, conversations, and observations that happen in real world situations are how people figure out their job. Julian Orr, in his book Talking About Machines, shows that much of what people learn about how to do their jobs comes in casual, friendly conversations over breakfast, at the water cooler, or on a coffee break.

Technology as Leverage

If we think that most of what people know about how to do their job comes from informal interaction, why not leverage that informal interaction using technology? Twitter is nothing more than a technological means to broadcast those casual conversations to a wider audience, spreading information more efficiently.

Instead of three or four people sharing ideas around a water cooler in an office, there could be thousands of people following the company’s microblog sharing ideas, asking questions, and improving the way things are done.

I worked closely with the external relations team of the organization to find the best way to visually communicate the changes to the employees. The layout and color palate were matched to the design standards used in the company’s new advertising campaign, so that employees could get an idea of what the advertisements would look like on television and in print.

One of the biggest challenges of this project was communicating the importance of the company’s brand to employees who may be suspicious of the value of the company’s rebranding efforts. This was addressed using a matching game, designed in Adobe Flash, that showed the value of many of the popular consumer brands that the employees interact with every day.

Because of the proprietary nature of the content, I am only able to provide limited screenshots of this project.

A full, live version of this tutorial is available.

I was particularly struck by her conclusion:

If you don’t have a supportive culture of openness and sharing you are screwed. Need to do the work there first.

This reminded me of a recent conversation I had with a Vice President at a medium-sized retail company. The topic of Twitter came up, and he had an opinion that is typical for those who are skeptical of social media. He asked, point blank, “what good would it possibly do for [CEO Name] to be on Twitter?”

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a great response at the time. I mumbled a few catch-phrases about being in touch with customers, getting rapid feedback, etc. but I had difficulty making a specific case for the CEO at his organization getting involved in social media.

Later that evening, I realized why it was difficult for me to give a concise explanation as to why the organization would benefit from having its CEO on twitter. The company was not a social organization to begin with. From what I know about the company, they have a very process-oriented culture that is focused on the “push” side of marketing –concentrating on how products get from vendor to customer instead of focusing on the “pull” of whether that product is indeed what the customer wants.

In addition to the organization’s focus on the process instead of the customer, I suspected that the organization also had a similar attitude toward its internal communications. I chatted with folks in the organization, and found that my hunch was correct: communication was process-oriented, and rarely involved input from employees. Not only were there no organizational blogs, forums, or wikis, but there was very little cross-department collaboration and communication.

Eureka! It seems that I have found the problem. If you are not a social organization, then social tools are of little value to you. My friend, the vice president, was right in assuming that the CEO would not get much from tweeting. There is no organizational framework for sharing information to begin with, so just having a tool for sharing information would not make much difference at all.

I worked closely with the information technology and internal audit teams to determine how best to communicate to employees the strategies that social engineers use, and the ways that employees can prevent being victims. This tutorial takes a scenario-based approach to provide real-life examples of how social engineers try to obtain information, and provides examples of how employees should respond.

Because of the proprietary nature of the content, I am only able to provide limited screenshots of this project.