Workplace, Teams, & Culture

There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software -- which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 -- that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users. This article offers a paradigm that highlights the salient characteristics of these new technologies, which the author refers to as SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals). The resulting organizational communication patterns can lead to highly productive and highly collaborative environments by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. Drawing on case studies and survey data, the article offers managers a set of ground rules for implementing the new technologies. First, it is necessary to create a receptive culture in order to prepare the way for new practices. Second, a common platform must be created to allow for a collaboration infrastructure. Third, an informal rollout of the technologies may be preferred to a more formal procedural change. And fourth, managerial support and leadership is crucial. Even when implanted and implemented well, these new technologies will certainly bring with them new challenges. These tools may well reduce management's ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company's leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.

Traditionally, executives are expected to create the vision for the organization they lead; the leaders' vision is then disseminated throughout the ranks. However, such top-down vision creation may mean that not all employees wholeheartedly embrace the vision they are given. An alternative approach to vision creation is found in the concept of "meaning-making." A meaning-maker is a member of a group who -- regardless of whether he or she is a formal authority figure -- articulates what the group is trying to accomplish in its work. Meaning-makers are typically deeply engaged in their work settings and are usually observant people who listen well and are in tune with a group's or an organization's rhythm. Using techniques such as images, humor or a new perspective on a situation, they are able to express a group's collective insight. For example, a pizza restaurant company was floundering until one of the senior managers articulated the idea that the company was not in a restaurant business so much as in a distribution business. This new model galvanized the organization, and local managers sought new outlets to distribute the company's pizza. Managers who are meaning-makers also may help others to articulate the meaning of the group's work, and such managers tend to embody a flexible style of leadership that recognizes that leadership is expressed in how people interact. While some have wondered whether meaning-making has to do with spirituality, the role of the meaning-maker in most organizations has less to do with transcendental, universal meaning than with identifying a here-and-now meaning related to the work people do together.

Companies are incurring enormous losses from the misappropriation of their trade secrets. In a 2002 survey of more than 130 firms, 40% reported actual or suspected losses, and the data suggest the true figure might be significantly higher. The study also estimated that the companies represented by the survey participants -- the Fortune 1000 corporations and 600 additional small and medium-sized companies -- were likely to have experienced trade-secret and other intellectual-property losses of more than $50 billion during a one-year period. Research has shown that the biggest threat to a company's trade secrets comes not from spying competitors but from within: current and former employees. Consequently, the protection of trade secrets is largely a managerial issue, and firms need to take the appropriate measures to ensure that employees keep trade secrets from leaking. But many organizations make a number of crucial missteps, sometimes failing to implement the right precautions or relying on a well-intentioned but ineffective practice -- or worse, a wrongheaded policy that only leads to more information being divulged. The following are the most common mistakes: giving short shrift to new-employee orientations, not communicating regularly with employees, signaling to employees that they aren't trusted, punishing instead of helping employees, not practicing what is preached, forgetting to clarify who owns ideas, defining the scope of trade secrets too narrowly and failing to address the subject of departing employees. By avoiding such mistakes, companies can help ensure that their trade secrets indeed stay secret.

The frequent failure of strategy might lie in its very definition.

Good communication is a prerequisite for good teamwork. But how much is enough?

The seeds of effective change must be planted by embedding procedural and behavioral changes in an organization long before the initiative is launched.

INTELLIGENCE: RESEARCH BRIEF: Vigilance is the key to avoiding potential organizational nightmares.

Forming close relationships with suppliers or customers is a popular business strategy, but such partnerships can develop problems. The authors observe that many close business relationships -- whether joint ventures or loose alliances -- fail. They describe a phenomenon they call the "dark side" of close relationships and maintain that close relationships that seem quite stable can, in fact, be vulnerable to decline and destruction. The authors draw both on their own surveys of business relationships and on other examples. The authors point out that the same factors that strengthen a partnership can also open the door to relationship problems. For example, when an automaker and a supplier built up personal relationships between employees at the two firms to facilitate their alliance and just-in-time manufacturing process, the trust and personal relationships also enabled the supplier more easily to cut corners in the production process. While observing that business relationships with problems can linger on for a surprisingly long time, the authors recommend strategies to prevent the "dark side" from taking over a business relationship. One such strategy is to ensure that both parties in the relationship make investments in it, in effect swapping "mutual hostages." If, however, damage to the relationship has already occurred, possible strategies include turning the crisis into an opportunity to improve the partnership, rotating in new personnel, reconfiguring the relationship or terminating it.

Throughout history, all business, innovation and even cognition have been based on localized cultural context. Pointing to the literature on the cultural antecedents of information and knowledge management (IKM), the authors make the argument that such cultural biases are the very spark of global innovation. They find it curious then that Western analytical assumptions currently dominate IKM research and development. Information and knowledge management models and frameworks that exclude the influence of national and regional culture have seriously undercut their potential effectiveness, particularly in global applications. If history is any guide, say the authors, these cultural influences must be encouraged if powerful new ideas for practical and theoretical IKM are to emerge.