2020 Social: Because Business is Social

The Social Employer Manifesto

Posted on 26. May, 2010 by Gautam in Announcements

David Armano recently posted the Social Business manifesto focusing on the relationship between a social business and its customers.
So I thought I’d give a shot to making a manifesto for the Social Business and its relationship with employees.

1. We will no longer view you as “employees” only to do the work you are assigned. Instead, you are co-creators, participants, critics and advocates.
2. We will actively ask for your input on products, services, structures, processes and give it to you to co-create them with us.
3. We will focus not on the time you spend in office but the results you achieve.
4. We will provide value, not jobs.
5. We will provide you the tools to connect across silos, departments, locations to meet the changing demands of a networked economy and social customers.
6. We will focus on your needs vs. our ends.
7. We will together focus on reducing the noise within the organization.
8. We will together destroy processes that do not let us build human relationships within and without.
9. We will encourage you to build relationships that connect all of us with partners, stakeholders and customers in ways where we all benefit.

Outlook Money Story on Social Media As a Career Option

Posted on 17. Mar, 2010 by admin in Media

Outlook Money recently quoted me in a story on social media as a career option –

I am not a social media specialist. Should I acquire social media skills?

Yes. “Social media skills are a multiplier to all sorts of conventional functions. A layer of social media skills over and above your core skills set can help you add value to yourself and your organisation,” says Gaurav Mishra, CEO, 2020 Social. This specially applies to people in the PR and marketing domain, those who have a primary responsibility in engaging with an audience… (but also to) HR professionals can use the social media as a recruitment tool to locate the right candidate based on skills and work profile.

Here is the full text of the story –

The Right Connect
As Companies increasingly use social media to reach out, it opens up a new career avenue
Anagh Pal

***

The Guiding Lights

Read More

Designing Organizational Learning for the Social Business

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Gautam in How To Guides, Ideas

Adults learn by social processes. David Kolb’s Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (1984) theorized that four combinations of perceiving and processing determine four learning styles that make up a learning cycle. According to Kolb, the learning cycle involves four processes that must be present for learning to occur:

• Activist – Active Experimentation (simulations, case study, homework). What’s new? I’m game for anything. Training approach – Problem solving, small group discussions, peer feedback, and homework all helpful; trainer should be a model of a professional, leaving the learner to determine her own criteria for relevance of materials.
• Reflector – Reflective Observation (logs, journals, brainstorming). I’d like time to think about this. Training approach – Lectures are helpful; trainer should provide expert interpretation (taskmaster/guide); judge performance by external criteria.
• Theorist – Abstract Conceptualization (lecture, papers, analogies). How does this relate to that? Training approach – Case studies, theory readings and thinking alone helps; almost everything else, including talking with experts, is not helpful.
• Pragmatist – Concrete Experience (laboratories, field work, observations). How can I apply this in practice? Training approach – Peer feedback is helpful; activities should apply skills; trainer is coach/helper for a self-directed autonomous learner.

The making of a Social Organization

Posted on 21. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

At 2020 Social one of the things we believe is that we are a our own petri-dish. We experiment with technology and processes to convert ourselves into the kind of organization we think is suitable to be called social.

So not only do we have a blog, a Facebook page, a twitter account, a twitter list showcasing all our tweets – we’ve also now started a wiki to focus on building a repository of social media successes in India – and will invite participation from like minded folks soon.

On the other side of the seriousness spectrum we have started a Fun page where we publicly talk on the lighter side of life at 2020 Social

Internally we are driving online collaboration using three tools, Google Apps for mail, document sharing and calendering - Socialtextfor internal conversations and collaboration on a wiki – and Basecamp for project management.

As social media enthusiasts we have noticed that internally even we need to see a business/behavioral benefit to using a tool – and we understand that more traditional businesses would need to see it more.

One of the way to showcase this is look for external cases where ROI has been calculated – but we believe that using the tools showcases a greater commitment and a better story for any client.

How to leverage Social Technologies to Build Online Talent Communities

Posted on 12. Dec, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Some thoughts I put together – on how the Recruiting function can leverage Online Talent Communities to build a pipeline for future workforce.

I know there are no great examples of “real” Talent Communities – and that is why I think the first organization that gets it right would benefit the most!

Thoughts? Send me an email ! View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh

Leadership in the time of Social Media

Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

(Cross posted from Gautam Ghosh on Organizations 2.0)

As organizations get more and more linked to external stakeholders, and their people become unofficial spokespeople on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and become marketers whether or not it is their role.

In such times – specially for organizations that are living in this hyper-linked worlds – what are the leadership behaviors that should be adopted.

Not surprisingly, these behaviors are not new. As I mentioned earlier, the tools of web 2.0 promise real organization development, and therefore, the behaviors of leaders must reflect the tenets of OD and these times.

They are:

1. Openness and Transparency – In the web 2.0 world there is little there is hidden, even vague terms of services cannot be changed without people noticing. A leader always has to remember and more importantly live this with the utmost sincerity – both within and externally
2. Conversation – It is not just about being transparent, leaders should also engage with employees and external stakeholders about what issues they face and if nothing else – they should acknowledge it, and if needed communicate what they are willing to do about it. Of course, sometimes legal and stockmarket requirements can require executives not to make forward looking statements. In earlier non-internet times I reckon this was known simply within the organization as MBWA

Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies

Posted on 27. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in How To Guides

Shared in the flow workspaces to enable Team Work Effectiveness

THE STORY SO FAR
(scenario 2 from here)

Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.

Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, is concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seem to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the delays are caused by the serial processing nature of the work: a mis-communication in the to-and-fro chain of emails would stop everyone else’s work and cause serious delays.

Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.

Trends towards Open Organizations

Posted on 16. Nov, 2009 by Gautam in Trends

Organizations are primarily communities first – and profit making machines later believed Arie de Geus and wrote it in his book The Living Company. These days, however, now businesses need to be social communities to survive and thrive.

We at 2020 Social believe that businesses will move to the next level of growth not by doing the same things that they were doing but by embracing some of the biggest trends that are shaping today’s culture.

Some of these trends that are having an impact on the workplace are:

1. Speed of decision making: As external change on organizations comes faster and faster, and as organizations get flatter and flatter – decisions are expected from the front line level which directly interact with customers, be they sales or customer support people. However often they don’t have access to information that they need to really do it well.
2. Transparency: As society and government opens up – employees are expecting similar transparency within their organizations – and when organizations are seen as secretive and opaque they lose either their employees energy and commitment – or at risk of losing the employees themselves to competition

Gautam Ghosh Has Joined 2020 Social to Build Our Organizational Collaboration Practice

Posted on 22. Oct, 2009 by gaurav in Announcements

I have a big announcement to make: Gautam Ghosh has joined 2020 Social to build the enterprise side of our Social Business Strategy practice. Gautam will join Dave, Upasana and myself in the core 2020 Social consulting team.

2020 Social is presently working with clients to leverage social technologies to achieve five types of strategic business objectives — increase revenue, decrease cost, design better products and processes, enable stronger relationships and increase productivity.

Instead of focusing on specific tools and technologies, we use a structured methodology to tap into the power of the five underlying value systems embedded in social technologies — user generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence.

Finally, we architect effective solutions in the form of community platforms, social applications, social commerce marketplaces, social CRM programs and enterprise collaboration programs.

Gautam will use his organizational development experience to help our clients think about the organizational culture and governance aspects of using social technologies. Specifically, here are the three questions Gautam will be working on –

1. What are the new challenges face by the customer-facing functions in the organization (sales, marketing, product and customer support) when the boundaries between employees, partners and consumers blur? How do organizations respond to these challenges?

On Joining 2020 Social

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Gautam in Announcements

‘Today I joined 20:20 Social, India’s first social business strategy consulting firm\n\nMost people I told this asked me what the heck is a social business strategy consulting firm?

Social business is the new term (or meme, if you will) that is emerging to describe organizations that are leveraging social software and tools to connect with customers and other stakeholders – that’s right folks, bringing the social web into the organization. As I have believed – such tools (call them web 2.0 or whatever) help in facilitating transparency and openness and help achieve the true goals of Organization Development

In my role in 2020 social (follow it on twitter) I would be looking at the enterprise practice – or essentially how organizations can deploy social tools to empower employees, build collaboration, develop knowledge and positively impact business. Yeah, some people call this Enterprise 2.0 too.

It takes me back to the starting point of my career – when I started out looking at organizational processes for Knowledge Managementand then e-learning.