Creating a Better Place to Work with Emergent Collaboration: Inside Scoop with Jacob Morgan

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CustomerThink Founder/CEO Bob Thompson interviews Jacob Morgan of Chess Media Group about enterprise collaboration strategy, tools and the role of leadership and culture.
 

Interview covers the following topics:

Interview recorded May 30, 2012. Transcript edited for clarity.

Bob Thompson:
Hi, this is Bob Thompson of CustomerThink. For this episode of Inside Scoop, my guest is Jacob Morgan, co-founder and principal of Chess Media Group, based here in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past few years, he’s made a really strong impact in the market in both social business and enterprise collaboration, and we’ll be talking a little bit more about those terms here in just a moment.

Jacob has done a lot of consulting, research, and he’s a very popular writer. In fact, he’s currently the number one ranked author in the CustomerThink community, in the social business category. And, he’s in our top 10 overall out of more than 500 active authors. In the past year, his content has been viewed over 80,000 times. So, Jacob, thanks for all that you’ve contributed to CustomerThink and welcome to Inside Scoop.

Jacob Morgan:
Thanks. I actually didn’t know about some of those things that you just mentioned. That’s great.

Bob Thompson:
Today we’re going to be talking about your new book, The Collaborative Organization. I’m very interested in getting your point of view on what this term “collaboration” means, how does technology relate to being “social,” and so on. But before we get into that, please start off and just describe briefly the focus of your business and what it is you’re doing right now.

Jacob Morgan:
Chess Media Group focuses on management consulting and strategic advice around collaboration. A lot of our focus right now has been on employee collaboration, but we have done work on the customer side as well. Typically organizations will come to us with a particular business problem. For example, they might come to us and say, “We’ve tried deploying tools in the past and employees don’t use them. What can we do?” or, “We want to become more collaborative. We did a survey within our company and our employees feel that we don’t collaborate and communicate effectively. How can we solve that problem?” Other organizations have been more involved with the collaboration and they say things like, “We have issues or problems with our collaboration initiatives. What we can do to solve these problems? Help us develop a use case, etc.”

Bob Thompson:
OK, awesome. And so, your book is all about this topic, The Collaborative Organization, and your subtitle, I find quite interesting. It says, “A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collaborative Tools.” What was it that inspired you to write this book?

Jacob Morgan:
So, it might sound kind of hokey, but it’s true. The reason why I wrote this book is because I have this belief that collaboration can make the world a better place, and that sort of idea wasn’t really enough for anyone, right? You can’t go to an executive and say, “Hey, you should do this because it’s going to make your world a better place.” They’ll laugh at you and think you’re nuts. But really the reason why I wrote this book is because I thought collaboration had much broader implications than just on the enterprise. Most of the focus that we see today is on how collaboration can make employees more productive, how we can get more money, how we can save more money, how the company can get more ideas, etc. It’s very, very focused on the business value and benefits to the enterprise. I thought the implications were a lot broader, in terms of being able to positively impact the lives of employees by being able to make them more connected and passionate about the work that they do, give them more time to spend with family and loved ones at home by making their jobs and their lives easier.

So, I thought the implications were a lot broader than just focusing on the enterprise. And in order to get that idea across—more than idea—in order to get it across as an action and strategic initiative, it’s important for executives and decision makers to have a strategic framework behind it. And so, that’s why I wrote the book, is to get that message across, but to provide the strategy behind it.

Bob Thompson:
Well, it’s extremely well written, and I’m super impressed at a pretty young age that you put out an excellent book, and you’ve really been advancing the thinking about this. And I like the fact that you’ve got a vision beyond just trying to earn the company a few bucks. I have to say that as I’ve gone around to conferences, generally when people are talking about this idea of emergent collaboration, they’re using this buzzword “Enterprise 2.0.” Nothing wrong with buzzwords; I think they do help us figure out, create a term or a brand for a set of ideas or technologies. But when I’ve asked vendors, especially, what is it this does for me, it’s been pretty limited. It’s certainly not as visionary as what you just described. There have been some exceptions, but generally it’s been all about productivity and how we can squeeze more out of the organization and so forth, and that’s not terribly inspiring.

Jacob Morgan:
No, it’s not. Not at all.

?

What is Emergent Collaboration?

Bob Thompson:
Since we’ve brought up some buzzwords, let’s start and make sure we’ve got terms understood here. You use the term “Emergent Collaboration” in your book. Could you please define that, and then how does it relate to some other terms—like I just mentioned Enterprise 2.0. There’s Social Business, there’s Social CRM, and by next week there will probably be two or three others.

Jacob Morgan:
Yes, exactly. So, the term (emergent collaboration) is actually something that I think Andrew McAfee wrote about five, six years ago now, I think, in a 2006 article. And for me personally, emergent collaboration has really just been a way to explain these new types of social and collaborative tools that we’re seeing. Jive, Yammer, SharePoint—collaborative tools that have these social capabilities built in allow for things such as collaboration, communication, sharing, etc. There’s no rocket science behind it. It’s not anything complicated, but it’s something that goes from more of a static platform to something that’s more social and interactive and collaborative within the enterprise. So, I think those types of tools, those types of software are what I would characterize as emergent collaboration software.

Bob Thompson:
OK, and so, is that the same essentially as Enterprise 2.0 as kind of an industry term?

Jacob Morgan:
Yeah, I would say so. It’s interesting because when I was writing the book, I actually went back and forth and I was like, “Oh, what should I call this?” There are so many terms. Is it Social Business? Is it Enterprise 2.0? Is it Emergent Collaboration? At the end of the day, I settled on Emergent Collaboration just because of the literal definitions of what it means. I mean, the word “emergent” means something new, something becoming noticed, and “collaboration” is two or more people working together to solve a problem or achieve a goal. And to me, that was just the simplest way to describe it. It’s a new way for two or more people to solve a problem or achieve a goal.

Bob Thompson:
OK, fair enough. You’ve made some comments in your book that the term “social” has kind of a mixed meaning. Maybe you could talk just briefly about that. What is it that you’re finding when you talk to business executives? Are they still a little nervous or gun-shy, shall we say, about social computing or social business for their employees?

Jacob Morgan:
It’s interesting because when you talk to some vendors, they’ll say, “Oh, all of our clients are on board. Everyone’s getting it. They’re very much involved.” But then when you start to have a little bit more intimate discussions with senior level leaders, you start to hear more of like the actual trepidation and issues and fear that they have with this. I think that a lot of organizations understand it’s important. They understand it’s a strategic initiative and investment that they’re going to be having to make at some point, but they are still very much trying to understand what the risks are. They’re still very much worried about a lot of these issues like negative employee feedback and confidential information and security. So, these are all issues that I don’t really see going away. But recently, within the last one year or so, I’d say that I’m definitely seeing more companies getting more interested in employee collaboration and wanting to learn more and find out more and looking to make these investments.

Creating a Better Place to Work

Bob Thompson:
Could you share a quick example of a company—pick a tool or set of tools that they use—and just describe briefly what that did for them and how it helped make the company a better place to work.

Jacob Morgan:
Sure. One that I particularly like is a printing and outsourcing company based in the Netherlands called Océ . During the economy, the economic recession, things became very tough for them and they had a very hard time trying to get budgets for things. Meanwhile, they couldn’t get budgets, but collaboration was also still a very big problem. So, they were faced with this interesting situation—solve this problem, but you don’t really get much money to do it. And so, they relied on a lot of free and low cost tools. They used wikis. I think they used the free version of Yammer. I think they used some YouTube channels, and they leveraged all these low cost, open source/free tools and technologies for employees to share their ideas and their voice within the enterprise.

Their CEO and their senior executives became very active, and they saw some actually very interesting, tangible business value out of it. One of the things that they saw was they were able to reduce the amount of money that they were spending on their traditional intranet. I think it was either tens or hundreds of thousands of euros in saved costs just from not having to fund their traditional intranet. The coolest business value that Océ saw was one of their employees had this idea, and keep in mind that before they deployed these tools, they knew we didn’t have a way for employees to share their ideas. If you had an idea, you really had no way to get it up the food chain. So, after they started deploying these tools, one of their employees had this idea and said, “We have a lot of truck drivers that go around the country and they deliver products, and they always fill up gas at the highway or near the highway where it’s very, very expensive. What if we could create some sort of incentive program that would allow our truck drivers to pull off the highway, drive maybe an extra one or two miles into a local town and fill up gas there where it’s cheaper?”

And so, the company thought this was a great idea. They put an incentive program into place and I think the recent stats that I heard was that it saves Océ 800,000 euros annually just by getting their truck drivers to fill up at local gas stations instead of off the highway. Now, again, very simple idea, but I think that’s part of what makes collaboration cool, is that it doesn’t need to be some sort of magical crazy idea that a company implements. It can be these simple little ideas that can have such a profound impact on the enterprise.

Companies like Vistaprint have deployed a series of tools internally as well. Their big problem was they wanted to decrease the onboarding time for new engineers. They deployed, I believe, an open source wiki, the same one that Wikipedia is run on, and they were able to decrease their onboarding time for new engineers by around 50 percent. TELUS is a really cool example. They’re a telecommunications company based out of Canada, and they have this global mission of being able to empower a large percentage of their workforce to work either part-time from home or full-time from home. And this is a big global initiative for them, and they’ve been leveraging everything from SharePoint to Second Life types of platforms to microblogging solutions, really being able to empower their employees to have a greater work/life balance. So, TELUS is actually one of my favorite companies. Dan Pontefract is the guy that’s leading this initiative over there, and they’ve done a tremendous job of making this a global initiative, and they’ve been doing some really amazing stuff.

Bob Thompson:
OK. Well, those are some great examples. And just as a comment to our readers for this interview, there’s a lot of great case studies in Jacob’s book, and, in fact, he shared some of them on our site as well. And I think that’s something that the industry has been asking for, for the past couple years. There’s been a lot of commentary about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business—is it good, is it not good, where’s the ROI, and so forth and so on—and the usual technology hype. But as you pointed out so well, I think business people are just trying to figure out how is this going to help my business? I want my employees to be happy. I want my customers to be happy. I’ve got to make money. How can you connect to those more fundamental strategies? And tools are great, but how’s it going to help me?

The Role of Leadership and Culture

Bob Thompson:

One of the ongoing debates is about the role of leadership and culture versus the tools. I’m curious what you’ve found in practice, as you worked with companies, about whether you need the right sort of leadership and culture for the tools to work, or do you find cases where you can bring collaborative tools in and they tend to spark a change in behavior because they enable new ways of working? What do you find in practice?

Jacob Morgan:
Yeah, that’s actually an excellent point. Both is the short answer. I think that organizations that are looking to make the investment in collaboration typically do understand that it’s going to be more than just a technology purchase. They typically understand that this is something that culture is going to be very heavily affected by. One of our recent clients are one of the world’s largest grocery retailers, and when we spoke with them, initially they said—we were very much talking about technology and they were like, “This is the tool that we want to use. This is how we want to use it.” And then they said, “By the way, we very much realize that culture is a big issue here, and we are working to solve that problem as well.”

So, I find that organizations do understand that culture needs to be supportive, but I think that you sort of get things going in tandem. Organizations understand that culture needs to be supportive, but also, when these tools are deployed, the tools help move that culture shift in the right direction because employees and managers see how much more open and transparent the organization is. They see tangible value much more clear, and that helps sort of move and push that culture in the right direction.

But nowadays, as far as Chess Media Group is concerned, it’s been rare for a company to come to us and say, “We just want a deploy a tool. We don’t want to touch culture. We don’t want to touch anything else within our enterprise. Just deploy the tool.” I actually can’t think of a single time that that’s ever happened. Organizations understand the two go hand in hand.

Bob Thompson:
I find that very encouraging. There’s a long history with CRM and, in fact, ERP and lots of technology-driven changes that there’s more to it than just putting in the technology, and companies that don’t figure out what those other things are can really struggle. Maybe I can ask the question a little bit differently. Have you found in your experience that there is a certain sort of behavior or a trait of a leader that might, in your view, really make it difficult for an emergent collaboration project to really fulfill its promise?

Jacob Morgan:
Yeah. So, I think there’s sort of two parts to that. The first one you asked was about culture, and I think within a lot of organizations, there isn’t just culture, there’s cultures. You take a large company that has 100,000, 200,000 employees, you’re going to find that there’s really no such thing as an organizational culture. It’s organizational cultures. Different departments might do things differently, different geographical locations might do things differently, and I think that’s one of the benefits of deploying these collaborative tools across the enterprise, is they can help sort of unify this culture across the enterprise.

Now, as far as leaders, Morten Hansen—I think he’s a professor at Berkeley now—actually wrote a very interesting book called “Collaboration,” which is specifically focused on these types of behaviors and traits of executives. And he wrote about something called T-shaped leaders and T-shaped executives, which are those that not only focus on their departments, but those that can work across departments and connect people across departments. So, those, I think, are really great leaders. I think the leaders that can act as stumbling blocks to these initiatives are those that are very—I don’t want to say conservative—maybe old school in their thinking.

Bob Thompson:
“Command and control” type of behavior?

Jacob Morgan:
Yeah, command and control, very much focused on a hierarchy. I spoke with one large organization where they just have this culture. Even though they don’t really interface with customers that often, everyone has to wear a suit and tie to work all the time. Nobody really knows why that culture is in place, but it’s been there for so long that they just do it. So, I think that type of mentality, even though it’s maybe a little bit of a simple example, is not very effective, right? You don’t want to do things just because they’ve been done that way for the past 50 years. You want an executive and a leader that can adapt to making change and that can be moldable to what’s happening in the world and with collaboration.

Bob Thompson:
Well, it makes a lot of sense. And in my time in the industry, which is now pushing almost 15 years, one of the biggest problems that just comes up over and over and over again is the problem of silos and cross silo communication, collaboration, you name it. Especially as you’re trying to deliver a good experience to customers and they are moving from a marketing to a sales to a service process, or multiple touch points, or whatever it might be, they navigate all these silos. It just seems to me that collaboration is a wonderful opportunity, given that you’re never going to get rid of silos because you need these specialized resources and people and organizations. But it seems like collaboration and the tools that enable it are great opportunities to try to bring better information flow, better teamwork, things that really will translate into value for customers as well as employees.

Jacob Morgan:
Oh, yeah, absolutely, and that’s one of the things that I think sometimes organizations forget, is they assume that collaboration for employees stays within employees. Now, there are very different problems, or different sets of problems that collaboration within the enterprise can solve, versus customer collaboration can solve. But if you can make your employees more collaborative, I think inherently that does benefit the customer because a lot of these employees are actually dealing with and communicating with your customers. So, if they can get the right information and the right data, and if they can solve problems quicker and bring in the right people to solve these problems, then that always will benefit the customer at the end of the day.

Evolution of Technology Industry

Bob Thompson:
Well, just one last question—just a quick view on where you think the technology industry is going. I mean clearly this is a technology-enabled strategy, if you will. Strategy is kind of an overused term, but it’s a new way of working, but without the technology, it’s pretty tough to pull this off. So, do you think that companies—especially bigger companies—are going to move to more of a single or at least a limited number of platforms, collaborative platforms, as opposed to what seems to be happening today, is that they’re trying a lot of different things? And so, one department’s using maybe Yammer, next department’s got a wiki, third department’s using some other collaborative tool, and it’s just kind of all over the map—do you think there’s kind of a rationalization and a narrowing down into a few vendors in the market and implemented within companies?

Jacob Morgan:
That’s a good question. I think we are moving towards that direction, especially with a lot of the acquisitions that we’ve seen recently, and I think there might be more as well. But I think there are two different types of technology vendors in this space. There are those that are trying to be the full scale, full suite collaboration platform, like a Jive or something that Yammer is trying to do, and there are other vendors that are trying to act as the types of aggregators that can plug into the various tools.

Bob Thompson:
So, that would be like maybe tibbr from TIBCO?

Jacob Morgan:
Yeah, maybe tibbr, and Qontext is another one. Jostle is another one that looks to aggregate and plug into a couple others. A lot of those aren’t honestly as popular, they’re not as visible, they’re not as known as the other guys, not necessarily because they have a worse product. Marketing budget-wise, I think it’s hard to match what some of the other big vendors are doing. But I think that those are the two different types of platforms that we’re seeing. I think ultimately at the end of the day, IT and business unit leaders would be very happy to see one platform and one vendor that can meet all their needs. But at the same time, you do see a lot of rogue deployments within the enterprise—I mean, especially within a large company. It’s rare—I can’t think of a single large company that we’ve talked to that hasn’t said that there have been multiple rogue deployments that employees are just going off on their own.

Bob Thompson:
Jacob, it’s been great talking with you. And once again, congratulations on your new book, The Collaborative Organization; it really is an excellent read. I’m very impressed with the work that you’ve been doing helping the market understand not only what this is, but how to make it work well for companies and their employees. So, thanks again for spending time with me on Inside Scoop.

Jacob Morgan
I'm a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and futurist who explores what the future of work is going to look like and how to create great experiences so that employees actually want to show up to work. I've written three best-selling books which are: The Employee Experience Advantage (2017), The Future of Work (2014), and The Collaborative Organization (2012).

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