Posted on

Meet Valve, the company “managing without managers”

Business Insider has published a small article about Valve a 16-year old company that has no corporate hierarchy whatsoever.

Valve’s basic approach to “managing without managers” is:

  • hire only incredibly self-motivated people
  • give them full autonomy to decide what project to work on
  • teach them to spot valuable projects, and to understand what value they can add to those projects
  • allow team structure to happen organically – teams self-select, leaders are chosen by their peers
  • encourage people to acknowledge and learn from mistakes quickly to move forward
  • make everyone responsible together for the success or failure of projects

and finally (and most critically):

  • determine the value and compensation of each employee by peer review

Read the full article to learn more

Posted on

The collaborative Economy – Key Take-Aways

Respected Analyst Jeremiah Owyang has produced a crystal clear talk about a movement that’s been growing in the past few year and has come to light under the name “collaborative economy“. Although is don’t like the term “collaborative economy” (I think networked or P2P economy is more appropriate), this name has crystalized a lot of attention on this movement and helped bring it to public attention.

Here are the key take aways from the talk:

The crowd turns to each other to get goods and services bypassing corporations

The sharing revolution is an unstoppable movement

Solution: embrace the collaborative economy value chain:
Company as a service
Motivate a Marketplace
Provide a platform

 

Posted on

Open value networks, serendipity, and the future of work

The notion of serendipity is not new to business thinking. The importance of unexpected conversations and knowledge exchange in innovation has been noted in the management literature for many years.
What is new is actually building a business – a machine – that systematically facilitates serendipity. This is what Seats2meet.com has achieved.

 

Continue reading “Open value networks, serendipity, and the future of work”

Posted on

Peer production and governance, commons and value creation in the collaborative economy

Michel Bauwens is a Peer-to-Peer theorist and an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation.

I already talked about Michel Bauwens’s work when discussing the revolution brought by open source and peer production models.

Here is another great video  where Michel explains what are peer-production, peer governance and how people use commons to create more value (the Wikipedia and Linux model). This work and organisation processes are fundamentally different compared to the traditional top-down models and Michel explains the characteristics of this new distributed models. Continue reading “Peer production and governance, commons and value creation in the collaborative economy”

Posted on

McKinsey Report: Social technologies could raise productivity by 20-25%

Guess what ? Email is not really efficient for knowledge management, information sharing and collaboration. Surprising, hum ? Well that’s nothing new for most people collaborating in online communities using blogs, wikis, social networks even though most companies use some kind of social technologies “in some way”, real collaboration is still Terra incognita.

So this report from McKinsey comes handy to convince businesses they really need to change the way they work. In their estimates interaction workers productivity could improve by 20-25%.

Continue reading “McKinsey Report: Social technologies could raise productivity by 20-25%”

Posted on

Social CRM: forget social media marketing, think social customer service

Social media is not just a new channel to push your marketing message, but a way to interact, provide customer service, get feedback and innovate with customers. Make your customers happy and they’ll do the promotion work for you. This holistic approach of managing customers interactions through social media is called social media customer relationship management (social CRM).

Continue reading “Social CRM: forget social media marketing, think social customer service”

Posted on

Brand communities and collective value creation processes

Most companies nowadays use social media like they used tradional marketing channel. One way message are constantly pushed onto web users.

They don’t understand brands are now only one voice out of many and that conversation about the brands are occuring constantly everywhere else. Better in some case users are so passionate that they create their own discussion places about the brand where they can support each other or even create more value around the brand products.

This case study looks at BricksBuilder, a community of Lego passionate and how they interact and create value. Continue reading “Brand communities and collective value creation processes”