Gaming the Enterprise, Part 2 of 2
Blog PostTaking time to understand game mechanics and the psychology of rewards will lead to more effective games, engaged employees and better business results.
Gaming the Enterprise, Part 1 of 2
Blog PostLast week I attended the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Saturday’s keynote was given by Seth Priebatsch, the orange-clad and exuberant Chief Ninja of SCVNGR, a location-based gaming start-up. The title of Seth’s keynote was The Game Layer on Top of the World. As he explained, the changes we’ve observed in social media over the last ten years have culminated in the “social layer.” Real life connections have become online connections. Facebook has become your social life. Twitter has helped you make new friends. The social layer is primarily about these connections. And it’s essentially done being built.
Facebook and Twitter are Shadow Customer Support
Blog PostAs Social Business matures to business as usual, social media strategies and tactics must move beyond listening and unstructured engagement.
Becoming a Compliant Social Business
Blog PostFINRA, FDA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR, are regarded as curse words in social media and workforce collaboration circles. People don’t want to say them. They don’t want to hear them and they really really don’t want the regulators to swing by for a “chat.” The outcomes created by this mentality are predictable: hesitancy when approaching new technology, over-engineered solutions that inhibit adoption and the pursuit of risky grassroots experimentation.
Communication as Work: In Real Life
Blog PostIn my last post I wrote about communication being an important aspect of knowledge work and decision making. I can sometimes get a little too academic with how things are supposed to work and so I thought I'd write a follow-up post that uses a concrete example (IRL for some) of how communication helped me and my colleague, Tom Cummings, just the other night. The setup here isn't that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order. We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.
Communication as Work
Blog PostA knowledge worker spends a good portion of the day communicating - meetings, status reports, emails, phone calls, water cooler talks. Much of this activity is considered unproductive overhead; when you look at a calendar full of meetings you wonder when you’re going to get any REAL work done. And while many popular forms of communication may be inefficient and ineffective, communication is work; perhaps the most important work knowledge workers do.
Design Your Process to Control the Chaos
Blog PostTwo separate themes stood out to me during my time at the E2.0 Conference in Boston last week. The first, design for loss of control, came directly out of JP Rangaswami’s top-notch keynote address. The second, how can E2.0 improve process at my company?, was something I picked up more organically from time spent in conversation with E2.0 pundits and practitioners. Separately, these concepts seem opposed but when blended together they create a healthy tension that exists in agile organizations.