Perry

Hewitt

Tag: collaboration

Friday 5 — 3.4.2016
1. My mild obsession with work hacks is gratified by this list of 32 of the best productivity tools. I’ve also observed that my habits have changed over time — I use overarching to-do and project management apps like Evernote less, and little tools like Momentum more.
2. When might it make sense to have a digital alter ego rather than share your real identity. This Berkman Center podcast shares stories of people who maintained secret identities on the web.
3. If doesn’t immediately resonate for you, you’re probably not engaging with DJ Khaled on Snapchat. AKA, you are old. Bloomberg analyzes how Snapchat built a multibillion dollar business by confusing olds.
4. Faced with the shifting demands of a digital era, organizations are forming new work processes and teams. Google recently revealed its own findings about what makes a high-functioning team. Sharing air time in meetings and understanding social cues figured prominently as common threads among successful teams. Quartz sums it up more succinctly — be nice.
5. The bloom is off the rose for some with Slack — rather than kill email, it’s escalating the number of messaging inputs. This won’t get any better as Slack rolls out voice calling.
Weekend fun: Last week we had Boston natives bashing a humanoid robot with a hockey stick — this week, a velociraptor checks you in a a robot hotel in Japan. But if that’s all too much, here’s a human making music, with an assist from 2,000 marbles.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
March 4, 2016
Friday 5 — 8.15.2014
1. Lots of buzz about the U.S. Government’s launch of a new SWAT-team digital service, and its digital services playbook. The tenets above are clear and proscriptive, and, true to the complexity of digital transformation, allude to the tremendous change management effort required. It’s not trivial to enable institutional culture shifts like “Address the whole experience from start to finish” and “Default to open.” Read about the launch, and check out the full playbook.
2. Email is both our dopamine-producing fix and a time sink that’s the bane of our existence. This list of gmail productivity plugins can help ease the pain. We’ve covered unroll.me before — Boomerang can delay email sends to conceal the shameful fact that you were looking at spreadsheets until 2:30 am.
3. But maybe we can help kill email off, instead? Collaboration tool Slack is doing a pretty reputable job of it for a number of startups out there.
4. Is Buzzfeed a media company or a technology company? Andreessen Horowitz invested $50 million in Buzzfeed this week, with the view that a tech-first media company with rising traffic and robust native advertising might be the one to crack the future of news code.
5. Long before Uber became a verb, directionally-challenged folks like me were avidly using the app to avoid getting lost in cities designed by sadists, like Boston. Uber’s new cruise control provides drivers and passengers alike turn-by-turn directions to make finding one’s way even easier.
Weekend fun: If you used any form of social media this week, you’ve no doubt seen the ice bucket challenge to raise awareness and cash for ALS. Notable participants have included Mark Zuckerberg, Martha Stewart, the New England Patriots, and Jimmy Fallon and the Roots. Questlove is not amused.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.
August 15, 2014
How to staff an effective social team

Good post from Jerry Kane on the difference between strategic and procedural social media practitioners. The former group understands your business and its vision, and the latter are the digital natives, expert in the tactical usage and what’s next on the horizon. The strategic team members have experiential business knowledge; the procedural pros have the digital muscle memory that informs both gestures and interface expectations. Clearly, age serves as a useful proxy for this divide.

Social media can enhance the status quo, or disrupt and advance business goals. If your organization’s social media is only a vehicle for news releases, a procedural approach can inform choices of the best technical tools, hashtag usage, and posting times. But if you want to use social media to change what you are doing alongside how you are doing it, cultivate strategic capabilities for your social team as well.

A concrete example: if you are a high-end pet care company, you can amplify your communications with a procedural approach to going social. Develop an Instagram program that posts your pet grooming success stories, and ride or create a hashtag for people to share similar photos. Create and actively curate a Facebook page with a system of recognition and prizes, and empower local moderators for that page.

But if your pet care company vision is growth into new revenue streams, you may want to take a more strategic approach to social. Think about offering your customers a sponsored sharing marketplace for your customer community to exchange good and services from crate exchanges to cat-sitting. In return for advancing a “collaborative economy” community, your company gains access to new, younger markets, and intelligence into demand for emerging products and services. This is a uniquely social opportunity, tied to your overall business vision.

As Kane points out from his teaching, “Classes that include both types of students are often more effective than either one taught separately.” The power of the mixed-capability team holds true in a business setting as well. Build a social team with procedural and strategic capabilities combined to avoid the pitfalls of silos and hierarchies. You’ll end up with a social-enabled organization that’s less reliant on a SWAT team and more aligned with your business goals.

July 23, 2013
What new leadership looks like

Last week I was lucky to hear two fascinating talks: from Bill George, HBS prof and author of True North, and Wael Ghonim, the Google employee and internet activist who energized pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt just over a year ago.

The theme that emerged for me was distributed leadership. George spoke about IBM’s collaborative organizational structure and shifting definition of leadership. In a workforce of 440,000 employees, he described IBM as cultivating 40,000 of them for some kind of leadership role. Ghonim focused on current and future challenges for Egypt and pointed to the importance of the many “ordinary” young Egyptians in the uprising — while disavowing narratives that position him as the movement’s hierarchical leader. (Good NPR review of his book, Revolution 2.)

The point about the death of command-and-control and emergence of new, global organizational models is not a new one. What was striking to me was two such different men with vastly different life experiences, both underscoring the imperative of reaching that conclusion.

February 11, 2012