Living by Design

In the last post , I talked about the importance of focusing on communities as the context for collaboration and knowledge sharing. How do you accelerate community building in your organization? Here are some ideas: Community Portal - Create a convenient, helpful central page of information that helps others discover, explore and engage your community. Include elements like: Identification Info - meaningful description of community context and purpose, links to core community artifacts. Communications - engaging news about community activity and contributions. People - highlight who is involved in your community. Exploration Tools - intuitive links, search and other navigation to help visitors find valuable content. Self Help and Interaction - FAQs, Q&A, and discussion forums to help the community find answers and kickstart collaborative contribution. Orientation - online training and help to remove barriers for new visitors, paving their transition to community con...

In a previous post, I suggested that the People are the Product , particularly in knowledge-based industries. However, when people in these contexts work and interact in a community , it becomes the platform for realizing continuous improvement and value innovation. What is a Community? Some of the definitions for community from the Miriam-Webster dictionary include: a unified body of individuals an interacting population of various kinds of individuals a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society In businesses, you find a variety of structures that help people interact and align to create value: Organizational units and teams Functional teams Cross functional teams Project teams Ad hoc communities of practice Informal associations and social relationships If we only recognize the traditional or formal "communities" or organizational structures in a business, we can easily end up managing and assessing only a fracti...

A friend of mine passed along an insightful article on the challenges of balancing efficiency and creativity at 3M. It describes how James McNerny, the previous CEO helped "turn-around" the failing stock price through aggressive cost cutting, discipline, and efficiency measures, modeled after successes realized at GE. This included the introduction of an army of Six Sigma "black belts" trained to measure and eek out every opportunity to improve the organization. The program had its desired result: predictability restored, conformance enforced, and profitability returned to target levels. Despite this success, dangerous side-effects were beginning to emerge. Break-through innovations were no longer the hallmark of 3M , a company that regularly generated a large amount of its revenue from newly introduced products. Patents based on new research also began to dwindle. When McNerny left for a position in Boeing in 2005, he was replaced with George Buckley. Buckley h...