Today I wrote a short note about the role of weblogs and communities in business strategy. Without going through the whole entry, I wrote about communities and weblogs that they have a high degree of the -what I call - I/O exponent:
"[they are] based on individuality as part of a community and personal ownership as part of your organization"
One of the best low-key approaches to introduce this I mentioned onwards in the thread, is to use a subtile but disarming method of introducing the concept behind the I/O exponent. Just imagine you are a manager in a large organization. What does individuality mean inside the organization? And what does ownership of processes, decisions and ideas mean? Being the manager, you have to read back to the sentence; it says individuality as part of a community and ownership as part of the organization. It does seem contradictionary, but it's a very important relationship.
Did the people that worked on Henry Ford's assembly line, feel they worked for Ford Motor Company after their ownership had been reduced to a single nut or buckle? Most likely, they did. But did they sense belonging? I would not say so.
Anyway as a manager even discovering what ownership and individuality mean in the corporate organization, can be a discovery process. I described the mentioned low-key approach for this (I have tried it actually, with surprising results). Give everyone a coffee mug with the company logo. It looks simple, but people started to write their names on the mug; after some weeks, by turns someone from the group would collect all the mugs and bring coffee back. A short but regular contact moment- similar to the 'coffee machine' analogy. The company logo without doubt, added a flavour of belonging to this emerging ritual.
The other thing in the plan was to hand out a pencil and paper during meetings and asking people to take notes on their plans, thoughts etc. After some time, these notes were picked up by the manager and randomly redistributed. Later on, the notes could be brought forward in the group. It seems simple, to have a weblog - knowlegde and idea-sharing system for 20 cents per participant. But it raised awareness about the values and importance of the concepts to the staff and insights in a changing role for the manager.
This happened at 1:16:22 AM or
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