Qui Audet Adipiscitur “Who dares, Wins!”

Think Like Zuck (McGraw-Hill, Jan 2013)

It is not surprising that the motto of the British SAS (Special Air Services paramilitary forces) should also find a home in the tech industry. Growing up as a Boy Scout in a former Crown colony, we sported SAS jackets as the fashion regardless of how the thick material made us sweat profusely in the jungle heat during hikes. We accepted the discomfort as a small factor with focus of being ready to last through the hikes and camping in the jungles of Borneo. We were explorers, hacking ourselves a new trail through the ever-changing undergrowth. The reward, simple but resounding, was the discovery of a hidden waterfall, a lost cave, or even a forgotten piece of history.

For one trip we brought no tents, but a large tarp, and despite never having designed or built a shelter before, we mocked up a plan for a wood and bamboo structure with two levels, raised platform floors, and siding. It took about a day to build and even as the rain started falling, we were striping bamboo and putting up siding to keep it out.

Qui Audet Adipiscitur, British SAS (Image: Wikipedia)

Did we know what we were doing? Specifically, no. Generally, yes. And it was more than enough to keep 30 scouts dry for a week of continuous rain, day and night, with only an hour or two of respite. In the overall jamboree of 100 different troops across several square miles of jungle, ours was the only structure later considered sound enough to let us stay while most others evacuated their flooded sites.

What does any of that have to do with Ms. Ekaterina Walter’s new book, Think Like Zuck? Coincidentally, quite a bit. After all, the technology industry is a new frontier, a new ‘wild west’ yet to be truly tamed. As Ms. Walter describes,

How easily we forget that other “empires” were run by the “inexperienced.” Bill Gates knew nothing about running a company when he founded Microsoft, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had been an investment banker when he started his company in his garage. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in college when they created Google.

I would certainly ascribe this quality of entrepreneurial exploration as part of the new work ethic of the generation of businesses currently emerging per the stories of this book.

At its heart, this is a book about the ethic, the drive of what makes us work, lead, and succeed. This is a profile of a number of young companies beyond Facebook alone, including parallels in TOMS, Dyson, Zappos, XPLANE, with examples from other long-standing institutions like Kimberly-Clark, Disney, and 3M.

By examining the attitudes toward work by the leaders profiled in this book, we cut into the layers of culture that are set into the tech-driven industries of today. While technology may not be the sole purpose of all these companies, they are strongly affected or facilitated by the ability that technology provides to share, distribute, interact and collaborate.

We can be explorers

This ethic of exploration strikes with the boldness to test out the limits regardless of how well you may know a particular domain. In part this may be due to the realization that we have a strong sense that the rules are being rewritten although not entirely sure how; one could wait and see, or simply take a direct hand in rewriting them.

To go in hand with the explorer’s spirit, as Ms. Walter describes it, is some degree of naiveté in the space. If you don’t know everything about a space, it reduces the view of risk.

This work ethic in particular often gets drummed out over time working in environments where risk taking is held carefully in check, or maintaining harmony with others in the system, organization or industry is part of the organizational culture.

Harmony it seems would be at odds with this ethic, but harmony could be viewed in different ways.

In the desire to make sure the risks are evaluated thoroughly or to reduce duplication of activity, some organizations focus significantly on checking plans with other teams. This is sometimes referred to as collaboration as well. Statements like “Make sure you collaborate with Team A on this. And did you talk to Mr. X and Ms. Y in this other department?”

The fear of duplication harks back to a drive for greater efficiency. Organizations that emphasize efficiency as a primary value tend to create a cultural assumption to avoid duplication, multiplicity, and risk taking.

Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE, one of the companies covered in this book, and author of The Connected Company (O’Reilly & Assoc., 2012), has a focus on the idea of ‘podular’ units or teams that are individually capable of doing work, and the organization as a fractal model of such movable pods. Without central coordination, duplication of work, context and teams, aren’t just possible but to be expected. The harmony of such an organizational model emerges from a shared common (and easy to comprehend) vision that individuals and teams can follow as a guide. However, what does emerge is creative destruction and creative loss.

If I have to summarize this ethic into a simple formula

(exploration + naiveté + risk-taking)

With the anti pattern

(efficiency-driving + deep knowledge + verification)

We are Makers

Another recurring motif that emerges out of the book is the Hacker ethic.  If you still think the word ‘Hacker’ is a negative one, it is also referred by other names: Makers, innovator’s view, or the entrepreneurial experimentation. As stated in the book

“Prototyping trumps discussions. And sometimes curiosity and imagination trump knowledge.”

Another personal reflection: back in my college days we started the HACKS club to take older computers and systems that University departments were done with to build new servers out of them. We learned to take it upon ourselves to take something we may know little or even nothing about, and try to bring it to life as something new, and learn about hardware, operating systems, and problem-solving along the way.

By mid-2013, there may be more smartphones and tablets in use than all the PCs worldwide, according to Mary Meeker, a partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufiled Byers, in her December 2012 Internet Trends talk and presentation. While this is quite a change of product focus for device vendors, the bigger question is how, and by the nature of these devices, where we will work in the future. I recently skyped with Citrix Podio co-Founder and Director of Brand Strategy, Jon Froda, who had recently spoken at the Techonomy 2012 conference on their idea of workshifting.

Jon Froda, Co-Founder & Director of Brand Strategy, Citrix Podio (source: Citrix)

Workshifting is described as “using the web to get work done anytime, anywhere — outside the traditional office space.” According to the Telework Research Network, 40% of jobs in the US could be done from home at least part of the time. Cloud software vendor Citrix claims workplace flexibility can save employers up to $20,000 per employee per year. More importantly 80% of employers say workshifting options help to recruit talent, and when telework policies are implemented, companies report a 25% reduction in employee attrition.

[[ Note: This is a part of my series--please click on link to see all posts tagged in this series--How Social Business Leaders Lead, focusing on how leaders of existing social businesses are evolving their own skills, along with their views of future models of work, the evolving nature of management, and the evolving structure of the organization.]]

Rawn Shah: “Do you think workshifting is becoming the norm?”

Jon Froda: “It is definitely becoming more common. Workshifting is taking off. In the US, it’s very much about [saving] commuting time: 1-2 hours going into the office. There [are] environmental issues around it as well.

The idea of working from anywhere also has to do with the nature of our task. [For] any sales rep, any [business development person], it’s nothing new. It’s [about] being out there, not being in the office.”

RS: “What can people do while on the move?”

JF: “You can build a Podio app in 5 minutes and come back to the office, rather than send a message by email, have an assistant [interpret and do that bit of work for you. These tools are especially important] when working with teams that are remote.

[Our acquisition] by Citrix Online brought more than 15 nationalities together. We also had … people relocating [to Copenhagen.] We realized that they (Citrix Online) were pretty close to what we wanted to do: to allow our people to work they want to. To us [during this acquisition], it has been the value of working that way, that way of thinking [about your work.]

RS: What I hear your saying is that workshifting plays an important role in Mergers and Acquisitions to maintain continuity of operations, something your company has experienced directly.

JF: “For our employees here, little has changed. For myself and management team, we have a little more coordinating to do. It is not a radically different. It’s a good match on culture. A lot of the people inside Citrix are startup people. It has grown through acquisition. It’s a pretty aggressive team that is really dedicated to work from anywhere. Inside Citrix, it is very common to do workshifting. A lot of people I work with everyday are sitting in the home office. In some cases, they do it more. Podio is a simple, fast paced agile team. [The people] I work with at Citrix are the same. ”

RS: “So how do you collaborate?”

JF: “[Collaboration tools] are the heart that connects the [activity].

[After any meeting,] what are you going to do with the files that you exchange? Where do [those] files fit into your workflow? [It is about] knowing the [context of what] you are working on, and also the social part. [A combination of] the idea of network [and the] the idea of task management.

Social for [the] sake [of being social] is not enough. We wanted to do more than [just talk to others] about work. You can do that with email, and microblog. [What we want is] more about how to marry it with the workflow.”

[RS: You may also want to see my prior piece on Podio, Cooking up Tasks and Workflows on the Social Web to understand how social workflows operate.]

RS: “What do you think of the statement: when you are working face-to-face with a person you get more done?”

JF: “I think there’s a truth to it. When you’re building your team it’s good [to work face to face]. But once you know your team, it is less important.

A lot of this has to do with making new work possible that was not possible before. If I had to fly to London and work there and could not travel, then I’d have to write email.

I think it’s a false premise to say that one is better than the other. It is a matter of capacity. Ten years ago, people where not as savvy with the tools. Now a lot more people are. There is also a culture around it. People are getting better at online collaboration.”

RS: “Do you think the laptop is going to go away?”

JF: “I think what’s gong to happen is that they are going to merge. And you have already seen these things [RS: Such as convertible laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, and small tablet-phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note or the Apple iPad Mini]. The merging of the tablet and laptop is going to happen. In some cases, you don’t need the laptop,; you only need the screen; think of a truck driver.

The interesting case is between the smartphone and the tablet. The bigger the tablets will merge into the laptops. What’s going to happen on the smartphone is going to be very interesting.”

Richie Etwaru, Dir. of Applied Innovation, UBS (Source: Richie Etwaru)

Mr. Richie Etwaru, Director of Applied Innovation & Transformation Portfolio at UBS, makes a poignant statement on the nature of work in this post Human as a Service that introduces a way of looking at how people and work duties are matched to each other in a way that improves the overall resilience of the business model and encourages creativity in the talent pool:

“Practitioners looking to the future for a vision of the IT department a decade or two ahead must stop looking at the cloud as a noun and start looking at clouding as a verb. Cloud is a noun describing a set of efficiency principles that can now be applied to a newly stateless once state-ful storage and compute IT estate driven by virtualization and cloud operating systems. It could be debated that the condominium or hotel were early commercial clouds, a housing cloud that was multi-tenet. Similarly Zipcar can be argued as a car cloud particularly if someone can zip a car into the Zipcar fleet and reap the corollary commercial benefits when said car is rented …

Looking one or two decades ahead, leaders are pressed to answer what can be clouded above and beyond compute and storage… Leaders must imagine a world where Workplace can be a Service, Expertise can be a Service, Business Process can be a Service…”

Mr. Etwaru is referring to how the cloud is transforming the workplace from fixed assets and resources of computing power to one where such resources come on-demand and can be utilized from anywhere. He takes it further by considering talent as a cloud, and descries an interesting view of the contrasting notions of ‘stateful’ and ‘stateless’ design of work. This introduces an interesting principle for designing an agile, flexible business model especially for balancing scale of business while improving talent and resource management.

What are the implications of a stateful versus a stateless model?

In technology, a stateful activity or session sets an agreement for all the resources along the path of process flow to be solely assigned for the duration of the activity. Each node in the flow is aware of the state or context of the session and has agreed or committed to the cause, so to speak, and thus we call it a stateful system. It requires contracting resources in advance and making sure all the pieces are in place before the activity can begin. The resources are essentially occupied and cannot do anything else until the session ends.

A stateless system on the other hand does not require that reservation of resources, and instead each step of the process completes it portion of activity and there is some indication of whom should receive the output next. They are generally not aware of any other nodes in the system other than from whom they received it and to whom they will send it, and do not need to keep track of the overall condition. Setting up such a process flow is easier since you do not need to align everything beforehand, and each node does not need to maintain state.

There are pros and cons to both, although it generally boils down to the overhead involved in knowing previous and next steps. Stateful devices made more efficient use of resources but were fairly inflexible or ‘brittle’. Stateless devices were cheaper and simpler to create, requiring less memory and processing to keep track of things. In the end, a stateless system is much more agile and resilient.

In the 1990s there was quite the cold war going on in the world of networks between the very idea of stateful and stateless networks. It was a classic battle between telecom carriers and the upstarts of the Internet service provider industry.

The traditional telecommunications companies of the time had very extensive stateful, session-oriented, switched networks, and proposed using a new protocol called ATM that continues this model. [This refers to Asynchronous Transfer Mode, not Automated Teller Machines.] In comparison, the Internet service providers relied on the packet-oriented stateless nature of the Internet Protocol. The Internet was designed so that long-haul communications could be disrupted anywhere along the web of network lines and still continue. A stateful network meant that any disruption would cut the communication.

While using the Internet may seem like a continuous session when you go onto Web sites and navigate through many pages or interact on a social network, it really is not; it is noticeable when accessing YouTube over a slow network and the video pauses partway as the network ‘slows down’. In practice, it turns out that stateless models can effectively emulate stateful behavior, for the vast majority of purposes.

The Internet Router triumphed over the ATM switch as the primary model of how the world communicates to this day. This says something: even though a stateless network cannot absolutely make guarantees on delivery or completion of its task or even the path it may take, this downside is overcome by the sheer scalability and flexibility of this model over stateful systems.

How does this apply to Work as a stateless model?

Coming back to Mr. Etwaru’s point, think about your business processes and how people are assigned long-term to specific jobs. These are essentially stateful reservation of people to tasks for a long period of time typically to a single manager and set of duties. Their expertise is available but far too often reserved for one area of business. Even if they wanted to they would often not be able to help too much other areas regardless of how much their expertise was needed.

Why is this? We often consider only the primary talents of an individual, their main skills or knowledge domain. The goal is to maximize their potential by applying them where they are best suited. Noble intent, but it ignores the reality that people are generally multidimensional and everyone has creativity and knowledge that can apply to other areas. A stateful talent system focuses on a single purpose and seeks to optimize it to the utmost; a stateless model recognizes that they could be doing different things at different times and balances variety with skill.

Too often, it is a matter of bureaucracy. The cost of their employment is managed at a departmental or team level and the manager needs to make sure they are contributing to that effort. Their work assignments or business commitments they plan to deliver for that time period, say a year, stay fixed to the duties of that team.

In comparison, Crowdsourcing and Collective Intelligence looks at work in a stateless manner, by breaking down a large project or set of work into smaller units that each requires completion by an available worker with the right expertise. The worker is engaged for a relatively shorter duration required to complete, can often self-select the work they want to complete, and depending on their own self-management skills can take on multiple jobs in parallel.

I don’t even use the word employee, because as we have seen from many Open Innovation and collective intelligence models, they may even come from outside the organization. For that matter, it might even be a team doing the work and not a single person; the pay for the job is the same amount, and the team decides how to distribute it.

There are two ideas here: the statelessness and the free market approach to work assignments. An enterprise business process can generally continue in the same overall approach, but it is the assignment of duties and reservation of resources that is dynamic.

This is how we can really apply the expertise and capacity of, as Mr. Etwaru describes it, Humans as a Service, in a dynamic, agile manner that can scale much more easily overcoming the stateful overhead mindset engendered by bureaucracy.  That dynamism and free-form structure allows mobility across an enterprise, inspires creativity by allowing people to work on different things following their changing interests, and drives the spirit of free markets.

In continuing my conversation with Jon Ferrara, CEO of marketing, sales and service process automation software vendor Nimble, we take a look at the changing nature of enterprise processes. Previously, I posted on the rise and fall of the first generation of CRM software, from Jon’s perspective from first startup Goldmine, a pioneering company in this field.

Jon Ferrara (source: Nimble)

As we left it, CRM eventually went from enabling a team of people across a company to document, interact and share their knowledge about each customer, to essentially favor data collection about customers to find common cross-customer issues and forecast planning. Individual customers and companies became anonymized into aggregate profiles and scenarios, rather than enabling employees to collaborate on specific issues of each customer.

In this article, we move back to looking at the how ‘R’ in CRM may be coming back. Sameer Patel, then Partner at Sovos Group (and now SVP and GM of Social Software at SAP) gave a keynote in 2011 on this question, “Did we forget the ‘R’ in CRM?” [as captured by friend and fellow social business blogger, V Mary Abraham].

[ Note: This is a part of my series--please click on link to see all posts tagged in this series--How Social Business Leaders Lead, focusing on how leaders of existing social businesses are evolving their own skills, along with their views of future models of work, the evolving nature of management, and the evolving structure of the organization.]

Rawn Shah: “Do you think how we sell is changing with social business?”

Jon Ferrara: “In the old days, we used to yell at our customers how great our products would work, and we expected them to line up like lemmings in front of our salespeople who would control the conversation and get the order, and then they would line up in front of our 800 number and get the service people and be serviced, and that was it. The executive would hide behind the wall. The marketing people would rarely engage; product people, forget it. And that whole thing was just being torn up from the inside and the outside in.

To give you an idea of the model that I think we are moving towards… If you go into a Houston’s Restaurant [part of the Hillstone Restaurant Group], you don’t have a waitress or waiter, you have a team, and they work together to affect the engagement, transparently to you and to themselves. In the old days, we used to use marketing to get the attention, and then basically the salesperson would engage.”

RS: “Why do you think the model has changed?”

JF:“Customers have shut down. They are fast-forwarding the commercials; they are throwing the advertising away; they are ignoring marketing materials; [and instead] having conversations [among] themselves on what to buy. And then [once] they’ve bought, they are yelling back at the company to whatever department they want, through whatever channel they want to … and they expect and authentic and relevant response in a timely fashion.

There’s no salesperson involved in that process anymore. I actually think there is a new role evolving, whether you call it Customer advocate, or Customer Wow; they are people within the organization that are actually part of the conversation out here. Whether or not you are waiting for people to come through your door, they are actually involved in what I call the five E’s of Social Business: Educate, Enchant, Engage, Embrace, and Empower the customer.

You educate with content. You enchant them with relevant, authentic conversations. And if you do that right, you are part of the decision process that happens today.”

RS: “Can you share an example of this in action?”

JF: “I was just tweeting about this today—there’s a guy named, Kevin M Green and I think that he was involved in scaling IBM’s #socialbiz [twitter hashtag] participation. Because I watch the channels, I listen. I’ve seen that IBM has globally empowered ambassadors across the whole organization to be educators, listeners, engagers and conversationalists throughout the whole organization. That is amazing. That is IBM. Are you aware of that?”

RS: “Yes, and to me there are still not enough of them, when you consider the size of the sales force versus the ambassadors.”

JF: “It is enough to be noticeable. That is all you need. What you guys are doing is practicing what you are preaching.”

RS: There’s a disintermediation of the sales force, and that works easily [in some industries] for simple retail. Now, for complex sales, do we still need a sales person?

JF: “I don’t think that we will ever do away with people who are engaging the prospecting customers [in their] decision cycle. What you call them and how you incentivize them, and how you structure it, will change.

It always bothered me that salespeople got the lion’s share of the compensation when in many respects it was the [sales engineer] who was doing a lot of the work, and I know that because I was that SE. I’ve been in sales, and a sales manager; I’ve been in each of those cycles. I think it’s the way we compensate that causes the fear and distrust and competitiveness, where they backstab, and the customer feels that.

So, going back to your question about the complex sales process, I think the whole idea about solutions selling and the methodologies come and go out of fashion. Now there’s Challenger sales, and everybody has a theory because they want to sell a book. But ultimately, the customer is going to dictate how the process shifts, not the sales person trying to fit the customer into a particular pattern or methodology.

And I think that the power of mobile and social, and the commoditization of technology, the shift in the way that we consume content – I was just reading today that the [media] networks are at the lowest low of content readership. People walk around all day like this [looking down and pretending to text on phone or type on a tablet]. The world is shifting beneath us.

Companies will still have to still sell their goods. People will still have to buy them. The way of engagement is shifting.”

[In the next part of my conversation with Jon Ferrara, we will take a look at the full picture of what an organizational model looks like with engagement at its center instead of Sales. Please feel free to comment here or reach me on Twitter, @rawn.]

Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble (source: Nimble, Inc.)

Jon Ferrara got started in the Customer Relationship Management industry the hardest way: he helped to create it, ground-up.

Currently as CEO of Nimble, he is right there at the heart of this second generation of CRM software systems, after having been there at the start, rise and fall of, as I would describe it, CRM 1.0. Nimble has been named one of Entrepreneur magazine’s 100 Brilliant Companies, PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice, and on Paul Greenberg’s SCRM Watchlist on ZDNet.

[ Note: This is a part of my series--please click on link to see all posts tagged in this series--How Social Business Leaders Lead, focusing on how leaders of existing social businesses are evolving their own skills, along with their views of future models of work, the evolving nature of management, and the evolving structure of the organization.]

In 1989 Jon launched his first company, Goldmine, with one of the earliest products in the space between collaboration, contact management and sales force automation. This was at a time when most companies were just getting used to the idea of local area networks (yes, with wires) as a business staple.  It helps to see why CRM 1.0 fell behind and what it became to understand the difference with where it is now because of social business.

In the early 1990s – it still scares me to think that was over two decades ago – I was in the PC-to-Unix connectivity business, in the days when Novell was still called ‘Big Red’ and a top competitor to Microsoft with its Netware workgroup networking products. I met up with Jon Ferrara in his hometown of Santa Monica, California to understand the evolution of CRM from someone who had experienced it first-hand.

Before Dropbox, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Hubspot, and the many social business tools to connect, share and collaborate across your business functions, people were concerned with a more basic question: how do I access my files on another machine?

If you were in sales operations, it was how to keep a customer proposal somewhere that had more than the 20MB of storage on your desktop computer; maintaining forecasting numbers on a Visicalc spreadsheet on a non-graphical user interface; and if you were lucky, email to your peers, employees or managers to ask, beg and plead for customer information across the company.

Sharing was still a strange idea. Most of the network access was more to have access to large storage space, which was typically broken up and distributed across employees as separate areas. There wasn’t really as much actual sharing in file sharing, between people at the time.

Jon had a different idea: what if there was a single application that could, as a team, manage customer records, manage calendars, track sales interactions, and even be used to track and forecast sales, and generally become a common sales and marketing automation system? After some years in different field and sales management roles at Banyan software, at the time a top competitor to Novell and Microsoft, he launched a startup in 1989 at age 27 with $3000.

Rawn Shah: “Can you tell me about how companies at the time viewed this new category of products?”

Jon Ferrara: “We were the first to the market with a unique product before its time. We had a networked business application before people know what the network was for, and we were trying to teach people how to nurture and build relationships as a team when they were still used to being the lone gun; and to market automation, sales pipeline processing and collaboration.

We had to educate the market, and at the same time, we didn’t have any money. We started the company with $3000. We had to scale the company. What I did is I learned lessons at Banyan. We [Banyan] got our butts kicked by Novell. Banyan had a great solution but they sold at the top through direct salespeople. It was a complex and expensive with a long roll out. There was this little company called Novell that had a workgroup solution that was affordable, easy to get started with, and sold through resellers. It was like a Trojan Horse into the corporation. People bought it in workgroups.

So what I did, is [that] I went after the Novell resellers, because they [had already] laid the network highway. I called up every Novell reseller in the country, one by one, and I shared my story about the power of engagement, customer relationships, sales automation, and collaboration, tying together content calendar and communication into one cohesive platform and integrating sales, marketing and support. I got them to use it, because people sell what they know and they know what they use. Eventually, they started recommending it to their customer base and that was the foundation of Goldmine. We used guerrilla marketing and PR to tell the story and scale the company. ”

[Note:

GoldMine Software during Jon’s tenure was awarded “Editor’s Choice’ by PC Magazine several years (1993, 1995-1997), and was ranked 154th on the 1997 Inc. 500. Goldmine CRM continues to win awards. ]

JF: “If you think about it, contact managers are what empowered and enchanted the line-level business people. It enabled them to build relationships and work as a team through those relationships. But management was fearful. They were fearful that salespeople would walk out the door with the contacts. They were fearful that the salesperson wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do. They didn’t trust them. And they wanted a pipeline forecast [so] they can figure out future growth. So CRM was then invented…

That was … the Golden Era of engagement and relationship management, workgroup/contact management, [and sales force automation]. CRM evolved from that. In many respects, CRM [transformed into something just] for line management and they forgot the sales guys.

When we invented Goldmine, it was not [just] about the sales guy, it was really about [the whole] team, the whole company… I believe that everybody in the company is part of the relationship and should be sharing [it]. I started out as an [sales engineer, so] I know the power of effective pre or post-sale customer service. … The product guys have to be involved in the conversation so they can improve the product.

But then CRM evolved.