 I'm David Lamberger, I'm at the Birken Center. Birken Center's already happy to host one of its own here, Andrew McAfee, who's new book, Enterprise 2.0. Can you get a really tight close-up on that? Can you bring it way in? There you go. Andrew is not only a fellow at the Birken Center. He's a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at MIT. He writes own blog. He writes a blog for HVR, for corporate business review, and for Forbes. He is the person who actually invented the phrase, Enterprise 2.0. But as you'll hear tonight, as Andrew gives a talk, it's much more than a phrase. It's actually quite an important concept. In fact, that's the subtitle for the book, much more than a phrase. You've heard the phrase, now read the book. The concept has been taken up quite widely by the business community, and more and more so as Andrew explains what it is. The amount of interest in this topic is substantial because of the rise of the Web 2.0 tools that we're all familiar with, collaborative tools, as Andrew, I think, will be talking about. So just a little housekeeping, and then I'll stop. There is a little party at the Birken Center, which you're invited, 23 Evergreen Street. Immediately afterwards, we'll go straight over, be 7.15, 7.30, something like that. And I want to remind you that this is being webcast, so you should not say anything that you want to stay only in this room, because it will not be only in this room. So Andrew, back to you. David, thanks. And thank you to the Birken Center and Harvard Law School for hosting this. It's great to actually see this show up to have a physical object instead of this theoretical book that you've been writing and talking about for a long time. So thank you for having an event where I get to kick this off. What I want to do is essentially just shoot my mouth off for about 20 minutes about some of the content of the book, and then let's just throw it open and talk about whatever we want to talk about. And during the shoot the mouth off period, I want to try to cover four insights that came to me as I was doing the research and writing the book. Things that I really didn't know when I started researching this whole topic of Enterprise 2.0. I had this vague sense that there was something interesting going on on the web. I heard this phrase, Web 2.0. And I had the even vaguer sense that it might mean something for everyday organizations, for organizations that are not internet companies, that are not primarily e-commerce companies, but are just trying to build better widgets, get them out the door with more productivity, and get them into the hands of customers better. So the rest of the economy. And even, as we'll talk about, organizations that are in the public sector as well. So I had this kind of vague idea that something interesting was going on. And what I want to talk about are four things that I learned as I was exploring this vague notion that turned into the book, Enterprise 2.0. And to do that, I want to go primarily through the lens of one of the case studies that goes throughout the book, which is not about a business, but actually about the US intelligence community, which is the collection of 16 federal agencies that has some responsibility for intelligence analysis. And it's this alphabet soup that most of us have heard of, at least some of the organizations inside the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, this alphabet soup of organizations that have intelligence responsibility and that fairly unambiguously did not do their jobs well enough individually or as a whole leading up to 9-11. And the 9-11 commission was formed to investigate basically everything that happened, including the attacks themselves, the lead-up to them, and the aftermath. And they wrote a brilliant document about what they learned. The 9-11 commission report is actually written in plain English. It is a gripping read. I recommend it. As soon as you're done with my book, you should pick up the 9-11 commission report. And the first thing I learned, I want to try to summarize with two of the phrases that appeared in the 9-11 report. When you string them together, it goes something like, even though the system was blinking red, no one was able to connect the dots leading up to 9-11. And what they meant by that was they did interviews with a bunch of tons of people. The CIA director at the time was George Tenet. And he said in the months leading up to the 9-11 attacks, the system was blinking red. And what he meant by that was that there were these pockets of intense energy, alarm, and in many cases, insight about what was going on, what the numbers were to. There was someone in the Phoenix office of the FBI who wrote a memo about people of Middle Eastern origins showing up at flight schools, really a lot more interested in taking planes off than landing them, for example. He thought this was something that we should look into. We arrested Zacharias Musias, I believe, in August of 2001, booked him on suspicion of damage to civil air facilities, did not get a search warrant for his laptop, unfortunately. The CIA and the FBI were watching many of the same people and not doing a good job about talking about who they were watching, or keeping each other up to speed on what they knew about these individuals, many of whom participated in the 9-11 attacks. So you couldn't say that the community as a whole was entirely ignorant about what was going on. It's just not the case. There were these pockets, these dots of intelligence and energy all throughout the community. In many cases, just waving their hands as loud as they could about what they thought was taking place. The massive failure was a failure to connect the dots. In other words, the community as a whole was not able to take advantage of what it knew and to synthesize what it knew well enough or in time to perceive the threats and to head them off. And the 9-11 commission report is actually fairly damning about it. And they say, we'll never know if we could have prevented the attacks or not. But it is not hard at all to imagine a scenario where we did. And they said, all you had to do was get these couple different pieces of intelligence to line up a bit differently. Then you could imagine we could detain a couple of the people. We could hold them as material witnesses or on immigration charges. We could have done something very differently. Who knows what have happened? It's a massive missed opportunity. So the first thing that I saw as I was doing a bit of background research and talking to members of the community was that not only had they failed to do their job, but the technology infrastructure that they had to help them obviously didn't work. And the more you look at it and the more you understand the technology infrastructure of the community, the less surprising that gets. The IT budgets for almost all of these 16 federal agencies can be measured in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars annually. And they have every flavor of IT that you can imagine to deal with intelligence problems. I kept on reading that the NSA, the National Security Agency, used to measure its computing power in acreage. It's just how much IT they had. Their job was to sniff out these little patterns and try to figure out what's going on out there. They flat didn't do their job well enough. When you look at the technology infrastructure, you see incredibly expensive, very dedicated, particular pieces of technology that are aimed at one particular task or one sector of work that do a lousy job of talking to each other. And there's almost no automated or technology-based cross-pollination across the agencies that mirrors, unfortunately, the way most of them work. Where the classic vision that we have of a loan analyst, forget about the operatives in the field, but imagine a loan analyst sitting in his cubicle, riding up a cable and passing that up to the boss. I was told that's actually not that far from how the community actually works. If the boss wants to take action on that cable, it goes one level higher up the stove pipe. If they don't, there it dies. And the intelligence and the information and everything kind of go no farther vertically or horizontally in the community. So when you look into how information actually happens or doesn't happen and how information technology supports that mission, you come away less surprised by the failure to connect the dots across the agency. And that mirrored what I'd been seeing over and over again in organizations where the technology infrastructure basically is not well suited for these more nebulous, collaborative, amorphous information sharing and knowledge sharing challenges. We have really good technologies inside companies these days for executing structured business processes. For the less structured, more dynamic, more fluid kinds of information sharing that we have to do, we use email to get everything done. And so what I saw in the community was an extreme example, but by no means an unrepresentative one of what the technology infrastructure actually is, what the state of the art was leading up to the middle of this decade, and the problems that could come from lousy ability to more fluidly share information. So the first insight was that the technology infrastructure is pretty poorly suited for a lot of the very important things. Not only that the intelligence community has to do, but that most organizations have to do. And the farther away you get away from the routine and from very structured work, the worse the technology toolkit gets. The second insight that I had was that the web had solved this problem out there on the big broad public internet. And I started to hear this phrase web 2.0 in about 2004, 2005. And at first I thought it was just the worst kind of hype from the technology sector. And just another example of its great ability to put old wine and new bottles and to talk about how interesting things were, even when things were actually relatively calm. And the only credit I give myself is the credit to test my skepticism a little bit, go out there and see what was happening with these alleged web 2.0 communities. I went to Wikipedia and the very first word I typed into the search box was skinhead. Now, this is not a political statement. I'm not a skinhead. I don't know very much about skinheads. I just knew that there are two basic flavors of skinhead and they really don't get along very well. There's the right racist, violent, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-immigrant skinhead. And then there's a flavor of skinhead that has exactly, almost exactly the same dress, shoelaces, suspenders, all of that. And they have to be opposite political philosophy when they're kind of peace and love, everybody get along racial harmony skinheads. And I thought if there's one place on the planet where I can watch web 2.0 fall apart, it will be at this weird, collaboratively produced, editor-free, online encyclopedia where they want everyone to get together and agree on the content of an entry. But there's no chance in hell the two different amps of skinhead are gonna come together and do this work at all well. And so I hit enter on that search box and I looked up about half an hour later having read the single best encyclopedia and skinheads that I'd ever come across. And I realized at that point that something was different and there was some new combination of technologies and business practices and philosophies layered on top of those technologies that was letting us do some novel things and things we just flat couldn't do before. And the more I poked around and I looked at examples like YouTube and Facebook and Flickr and Wikipedia and Delicious and all the usual web 2.0 suspects more of the same thing going on which was just this burst of collaborative energy yielding extremely impressive results. And as I looked around, three things became apparent. The first one was that what we were doing on the web was opening up all these web 2.0 communities to very, very broad participation. You didn't need any money to play in most of these. You needed few or no technical chops and you need no credentials to start contributing to Wikipedia. The second thing was that all of the web 2.0 technologies were trying really hard to avoid imposing a lot of structure. And again, we are really good by now using technology to define structure, roles and responsibilities, workflow, decision rights, all that stuff. We're great at using technology to do that. What the leaders of web 2.0 were doing was essentially exactly the opposite and just getting out of the way as much as they could to let people do what they wanted to do and just throw content up there, assume whatever role they wanted to with that content, refine it, massage it, put it up there at first, just do whatever you want to do and putting very, very few rules in place of any kind that made sense to me. The third thing all these technologies had in common is this amazing property that even though we were opening the doors to contribution to the entire universe basically and putting very few rules in place, what we were winding up with was not chaos and not this massive body of completely undifferentiated online information. Instead, we were winding up with environments that wound up being very precisely structured anyway. So we can find what we're looking for. We can find a good article on Wikipedia very easily. All these web 2.0 environments had this amazing kind of geodesic dome property where the bigger they got, the better they got and the more powerful they got. This is the opposite of what a lot of us were expecting. There is a great quote in the early days of the internet that the net is the world's largest library. The problem is all the books are on the floor. This is wonderful image, right? There's great content out there, but you have to get very lucky essentially to find what you're looking for. In the era of Google and the other web 2.0 tools, we don't feel that way anymore. And one of the cute party tricks I do when I'm speaking at conferences is to ask people to raise their hand if their corporate intranet is easier to search and navigate and find stuff on than the big broad public intranet. Out of curiosity, how many of us have raised our hands about that? Let the record show there's not a hand up in this room. So this just highlighted to me the difference between what was going on inside the organizations that I was studying and what was taking place on the internet where there were very tough problems being addressed and very effectively on the public web with web 2.0 and what was going on in organizations was lagging very far behind. The third thing that I noticed was what I saw as I watched organizations try to harness these web 2.0 tools and this web 2.0 energy and bring it inside the organization. And I'll talk about the intelligence community again here. I had the chance to go do some interviews at CIA headquarters, which was just a fantastic experience and in best 2.0 fashion, one of my main contacts there said, Andy, we can't bring all hundreds of thousands of members of the community through to talk to you, but tell me what questions you wanna ask and I'll put them up on my internal blog. You can't see it after we have to go through the review process before we can show it to you, but all the stuff that's clean I can pass on to you eventually. So I said, great. The first question I asked was tell us what these tools let you do that you flat couldn't do before. In other words, if it's just an incremental improvement to your work as an analyst, I'm not that interested. If this has let you do something new under the sun, please tell us about that. And so he posted them up. I got to see almost all the responses and I learned something that to this day continues to surprise me. What I was expecting to hear back is something like what I had experienced with Wikipedia, which is it's a phenomenal information resource. It has become a reference work for this intelligence community that just didn't exist before and couldn't have existed before. So what I was expecting to hear back is something like the article about the Taliban in Afghanistan is the single best resource on that topic inside the whole community now. It's where I go to educate myself. I contribute to it. It's become this living kind of dynamic information source on that particular topic. And what I heard back was something not hugely different, but I think the difference is really important and really illustrative. What I heard back over and over from people all throughout the community was, and I'll use the same example, was because of the Intellipedia article about the Taliban in Afghanistan. I now know someone who sits over in the Geospatial Agency analyzing satellite imagery of the Middle East who really knows her stuff. And I can tell she really knows her stuff because of her contributions to Intellipedia. They're not anonymous. They're all attributed inside the community so you can see who did what. I learned she also writes a blog so I went there and checked out her blog and I can see that she really knows her stuff and she's working on things that are directly relevant for my job as well. And all of a sudden I have a new colleague elsewhere in this community and in the old world I had no way to be aware of that person's existence. In the old world of write the cable and put it on your boss's desk. I can't, I'm not part of that. I'm over halfway across the world in a different part of the community. Not even in the same organization. I can't, I could not have found her before. We might have some white pages I could have consulted. They don't give you any real information. We don't do intelligence community-wide jamborees periodically where all hundreds of thousands of people talk for five minutes each. We can't do that. So in the old world I really didn't have a way to find this person. In the new world I have a great way to locate this kind of expertise. So I used to think that the main benefit that we get from these 2.0 style tools and approaches was the ability to collectively generate masses of information. Wikipedia kind of took me down that road. I think that is a legitimate benefit and it's really important. Another really important benefit though is that these pools of information serve as reflection points for the brains elsewhere in the organization or elsewhere in the community. And even if the brains aren't using the tools themselves to collaborate and to communicate, maybe they pick up the phone or send an email to each other. The fact that these new style repositories of information are there is actually tremendously important and they let organizations do stuff they flat couldn't do before. So my thinking about the real value of these expanded from just thinking about information to thinking about this idea of a reflection point to different brains in the organization and also I started to think that the main value of the tools might not be that they coordinate with people you already know well or even keep in touch with people that you know a little bit. The really deep value, especially for larger organizations, might be that they let you meet people who you flat wouldn't have done otherwise. That's historically been a really tough problem to solve in organizations. It's been a very human centric problem because we rely on these weird human rolodexes that are so valuable inside organizations who always seem to know what everybody else is working on and can always make an introduction. Those four are still valuable. It's not like they have to go looking for work now. And so I don't think that what we're doing with technology is a direct substitute for all these great human methods but it's a compliment for it and it's a compliment that was really hard to come across in the old world. The fourth thing that I'll learn and then I wanna stop talking and see what other people wanna talk about is the idea that this is not as easy as it very often looks and that got brought home to me first in the first company where I was doing interviews about Enterprise 2.0. It was a bank that had tried to launch these tools and I was doing my first interview with one of the managers, line managers, not one of the, someone in the IT department who was really excited about these tools and encouraged his team to use them and to use the Wiki instead of sending an email and do all the things that we would recognize. And I said, oh, fantastic. What was your experience with it? And I'm pretty sure the guy taught at a business school because he said to me, well, what do you think our experience with it was? And suddenly I was in the student spot and I said, well, I would imagine that you had kind of a Wikipedia experience where you had to do some training, teach people how to edit but they fairly quickly realized this was a better mousetrap, a better way to get work done and so there was a tipping point for you experienced and suddenly work migrated all the way over to the Wiki and he said, absolutely not. We are still marching ahead actually quite slowly on this and he said, you have to realize that Wikipedia is this amazing resource with thousands of contributors but that's out of hundreds of millions of people who are potential contributors to it, people with web access basically. The percentage of people who actually will take time to do more than lurk and who will actually edit or contribute to Wikipedia is just vanishingly small as a percentage of all possible people. If you scale that down to organizational size, you've got nothing, you're absolutely dead in the water and so it helped me realize that this stuff was not any kind of done deal where it's just so much better than what we were doing before that we're all just gonna stampede to it, especially those of us I think who aren't part of the Facebook generation and don't reflexively reach for 2.0 tools to get all of our work done. So that implies to me anyway that this is where management comes in. I mean management kind of broad sense of running any size organization. The main problem that they have is a numbers problem where if you scale down what we see on the web with web 2.0 you're gonna wind up with little to nothing. So it's increasing that ambient percentage or ambient amount of contribution that's critically important. Inside organizations or even across communities we have a wonderful managerial tool kit for doing that. We have culture that we can shape over time. We can coach and lead by example. We can put incentives in place and there's a nice healthy debate taking place among people right now about how hard the incentives should be for contributing and for participating in the new styles of technology out there. So the managers of an organization have this war that they fight to try to increase the ambient percentage and to give people to walk away from their existing patterns of collaboration which basically means send an email off to someone and start doing not necessarily more things but some different things as well. The main tool they have to do that is again this idea of management, this huge tool kit that we have that we teach at business schools about how you get organizations to move over time in some direction that you want. I'm left with the idea that in most organizations enterprise 2.0 is gonna be a long haul. There are gonna be relatively few overnight successes especially as you walk away from organizations that are really heavy with young people or extremely tech centric. So basically the farther you go from the tech sector the more this is going to take time. That implies we need to have some patience with this. The phenomenon as a whole is somewhere less than four years old. Given that I'm incredibly pleased and optimistic about what's happening now and what's gonna happen going forward. When you look at surveys of enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0 tools take up inside the enterprise the numbers are good and getting better but it's far too late to call this over and to say that we understand the whole phenomenon or that it's completely deployed and in place in organizations. Absolutely not the case yet. I'm personally pretty optimistic that organizations that want to are going to be able to get there. I'm a little less sure how many organizations actually wanna open up the floodgates and embrace this new style of collaborative work. I think it's gonna be a real test of whether the organizations that I'm familiar with actually believe their mission statements which is people are our most important resource you wanna empower and blah blah blah. You know how those things go. Here's a wonderful set of technologies to put that to the test. We're gonna wait and see how many organizations mean that to the extent of being willing to embrace what's going on now. Let me stop there. I'd love to hear questions, comments, reactions. I was that clear or that boring which isn't. I'm gonna put my moderator at the end of the queue. Yeah, go ahead. Have you noticed that organizations that are effective already as learning organizations or organizations that are genuinely committed to becoming really good learning organizations have an upper hand in effectively implementing enterprise 0.0 tool? I think that absolutely helps. I don't think though that it's an absolute precondition to success here because again, I'm gonna fall back on the intelligence community. This was a huge distributed set of 16 organizations that had a deep and very proud history of really not getting along with each other and not sharing very well. And when I went to do my interviews, I said to my CIA colleagues, come on, the stuff we hear on the outside is overblowing. You don't really dislike the FBI. Do you? We hate those guys. We have this deep antipathy. We don't look at the world the same way. We don't share information. There's no organizational love there. And despite that, we're actually making some headway in changing the culture. So I think it's absolutely an accelerator if you already have a culture of learning and collaboration and mutual respect, absolutely. But what I'm really heartened by is the fact that I see organizations without that culture where there's this combination of bottom up energy. In other words, people who really wanna catch bad guys inside the community and official top level support. And inside the community, the official state of philosophy has gone from need to know to responsibility to share information. That makes me somewhat optimistic that if the top and parts of the bottom want this to happen, that we might be able to get through a lot of the resistance that we sense in the middle. So that community is- I'm sorry, no follow-ups. I'm going. I think that it actually truly does value that collaboration and learning. Yeah, and there have been a couple of reports written about the state of the transformation that say there's evidence already changing the way at least some people do their analysis work. It's too early, I think, to say that the community as a whole has shifted over to 2.0-style collaboration. That's way too bold to claim to make. But are there pockets of energy? Yes, and I've talked to many people who said, if we turn this off, I'd have to leave the community. I can't go back to working the old way. I think it'd be such a massive step backward. Please. I would suggest that another way of looking at one aspect of what your third point I believe was is that the initial conception, at least public deception of the web, starting in the mid-90s, tended to be on accessing and sharing information. What I think is increasing and clear is that, and I think is consistent with what your third point was, which is that the second critical role is in putting people in contact with other people. That really one of the hugest powers of this kind of technology in action is that it's enabling people to communicate with people that they otherwise would not be able to communicate across geographical boundaries, across cultural boundaries, and so forth. In that, I would suggest that one of the things I've noticed a bit to a series of conferences just happens in this last few days. There's a tendency to focus on technology. I've made my money with computers for a long time. In fact, one of the early projects I worked on here directly and indirectly was the general employer project that was funded by the CIA at the time for doing content analysis of pronouncements of class news agency and the China news agency punched on punch cards. I worked on some of the statistical analysis that came for that. I've always made money in computers, but my training was in my undergraduate degree here as in social relations, which is social anthropology, sociology, personality theory, and social psychology. My sense of it is having spent my career in the computer business that we're at a very interesting point now because one of the key things that's happening here, and you see this in the web 2.0 or the enterprise 2.0, is organizations are every bit as much evolutionary beings as individual human beings. And I would suggest that what we've got is a kind of evolutionary change that comes about. One of the reasons why new companies often have to do it because the old companies have a hard time dealing with that much evolutionary change. I would invite you to comment on that, but also three companies are a good example. Thank you, I feel free to do that. Three companies are a good example on that, I think. Historically, IBM, Microsoft, Google, and then a good question that goes to you is who could be the fourth in that sequence? In that series, sort of like a basic intelligence test where you have to fill up the blank of the next series. Yeah, two quick reactions to that. The only slight amendment I wanna offer is to your point that it's not about the technology, which I agree with in large part. It's never exclusively about the technology. The reason I don't like that phrase, and I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but the reason I don't like that phrase is sometimes it is about the technology, at least in part. In other words, the Web 2.0 era was brought about because some new stuff, some new tools got added to the public web. Wikis are new, Google PageRank is new, Volkswagen's and Tag Clouds are new. We couldn't have done it without those new tools, so sometimes it's not not about the technology. If I should just talk to you about that. My intention would be that what's happening is that the development of technology I would agree with you absolutely is critical, but that's what creates the new evolutionary soup, if you will, that then not only enables but requires that institutional structures whether they're companies, countries, cultures, evolve in response to the inherent potential that's created by the emerging technology. And what's the next, what's the fourth organization in your series? This is quicksand for anyone, right? But when we look at the real-time web and the social web and we look at entities like Facebook and Twitter, we see just astonishing rates of growth and innovation. That's almost a cop-out of an answer because they're already so prominent now, but that's the best I'm gonna be able to do. Please. See if that is fair. Fear is the main reaction that we get on that. When you start talking about this, there is a laundry list of concerns that crop up in the minds of any responsible manager, all the bad things that could happen if I throw open the barriers to contribution and just kind of let people do what they wanna do. The main point that I tried to make in the book and that I wanna stress again here is that while those things are certainly possible, we see, I see few to no instances of them actually happening in the real world. So for example, I haven't seen companies have Chinese wall violations where some content that needs to remain private becomes public inside the organization. I haven't seen examples of hate speech or harassment taking place on these kinds of platforms. I haven't heard examples of sensitive information leaking to the outside world. So I go down the laundry list of concerns, I hear them, I just haven't seen them crop up in the real world. I think overall it's because people do know how to behave in their jobs and if they really wanted to get fired, they weren't waiting around for employee blocks to have that privilege, right? There are plenty of ways to harass a coworker before they came along. So I realize that sounds a little bit. I realize that sounds a little bit flip, but I mean it sincerely. I haven't come across the horror stories that make me question whether the benefits outweigh the risks, because the risks really haven't manifested themselves in anything I've seen. Yeah, please. The point you touched on is very opinionated to one, you know, enterprise-based one, in terms of the number of people who are contributors versus workers. What are the mechanisms to vote about the participant to lurker ratio? There are, I assume that's what has to happen in this work. Yeah, it's what has to happen. So for that particular example, I can think of a couple of things. I can think of, for example, making sure that you can acquire and build status inside this community via your contributions. I read this weird article in the New York Times a while back about Verizon's website, how they've opened up part of it so the community can answer each other's questions about my wireless routers down or I can't configure my HDTV. And the article profiled a retiree in Texas, this guy's 65 years old, who never worked at Verizon, who spends 25 hours a week on their site helping strangers across the country do their fix their wireless routers, right? This seems insane. The main reason the guy does it is he needs something to do with his time and he feels valued inside this community. He has a huge amount of status and authority inside this community. We should be able to activate that energy to at least the same extent inside an organization as well. I struggle with how hard to make those incentives. Do you bake them into the performance review? Do you provide any kind of real rewards? You know, whether it's cash or vacation days or whatever to do that. As someone who spent a lot of time in a business school, I believe that people respond to incentives. I talk to a lot of people who think that their best way to kill this kind of energy is to start hanging, to start dangling carrots off it for people. It's just not how it's going to work. So I don't know the exact answer there, but I can imagine both kind of peer effects being really valuable and then also more official recognition from the hierarchy of the organization being valuable. They feel almost, they're almost antithetical. And I wonder about that. I'm not sure they have to be antithetical to each other. And somewhere in between is the organizational pat on the back that we can give people that might make sense both for the peer community and for the hierarchy as well. I certainly hope those two things are not forever at loggerheads with each other. That would be distressing. The other thing we can do, I'm gonna roll with this question for a minute longer. The other thing we can do is roll out tools for which there is no current incumbent technology. And I think a big part of the reason that things like social networking tools very often take off inside organizations and micro blogging tools like Twitter equivalents take off inside organizations is that there's nothing there but they're displacing. They scratch and itch. We didn't even know we had the itch in a lot of cases, but they let us do things we flat can't do right now. So we see those tools take off a lot more quickly and a lot more spontaneously inside organizations. Yeah, please. I would like to add to that that I don't see that the hierarchy per se is antithetical to the whole structure of the incentive structure in the hierarchy. Now when I say, well, you raised your time, you're back to O stuff, but you know, the one who gets the promotion is that one who keeps his knowledge and just provides his exclusive memo and I think the hierarchy can persist, but it's just the incentive structure in the hierarchy that has to be changed and adapted to allow the participation in all the sharing. Yeah, I think that's a lovely point because one of the things that I've seen over and over when organizations turn on these new tools is people look around for the signals about whether or not they should really be doing this. Is this a career limiting move? What happens to the people who are the most prolific contributors? Or like you say, do we keep promoting, rewarding the drones who sit in their cubicle and don't help anybody else? Or the bootlickers that are hanging around the office? We have very clear signals about how deeply these kinds of contribution are valued and organizations had better be aware of that and use those signals to their advantage. If this is perceived as one more thing to do in addition to the rest of my very busy job, that no one that I care about values, we're not going to do this. And does that go back to culture, the culture in which they were trusting or are we starting as structured? Is it probably going to take any real structure or kind of lack of organizations? Yeah, as I said before, I think that all those kinds of fluidity and interconnectedness and a collaborative nature, those things definitely help. They make it easier. What I don't want to say is that if you are an old school organization that's been around for a long time and has a very stable kind of old fashioned looking structure, you can't succeed with this. I've seen too many examples of places like Johnson and Johnson and Proctor and Gamble and Lockheed for Heaven's sake and Booz Allen and the US intelligence community. These are not young organizations. These are not terribly swinging organizations and they're all making some headway with this kind of stuff. So I completely accept it's easier based on our existing culture, but to the point made earlier, culture can morph over time. The thing that makes me most optimistic is when the real leaders, the formal leaders of the organization say, wait a minute, we've got to do something different. The world is changing too quick for us to organize ourselves the old way and we like this technology toolkit to help us with that. Please. So the first thing I was thinking of was that if you go back to Metcalfe's law, which has the power or value of the network rose by the square of the number of nodes. Yep, right. But so obviously networking means by directional communication as opposed to the old information age we resolved on my broadcasting is a major step forward. But let me give you an example that happened to me working within a large technology company four years ago. I moved my staff to start using Twiki. Okay. It was a form of wiki. And I incented them to do so, to use it because it saved them time filling out other things. They were able to collaborate, they were able to get things done. And for them- Please tell us the story has a happy ending. Yes. Thank God. That part was, that part worked very well. Thank you, we're done here. But what didn't have, that was a proprietary internal messaging system, right? For the honey, for the tatama, for what we go outside with, you need something else. A social network that's more like what you think is a customer service application that allows the community to collaborate on issues. And those are two totally different things. Yeah, and I think that's right. One of the other things that you wanna do is find some voices in your community to represent yourself to the big outside world on your properties. And I notice a huge sharp difference when the topic of employee blogging onto the external world comes up. Some organizations say over our dead body would be ever allowing kind of unfiltered communication like that to go out. Other ones say, you have no idea how big a play you're missing by not allowing that to happen. Because what we, what the consumers of the world are tired of is one more PR megaphone shouting, I think it just doesn't work anymore. I think it gets back to cultural means and it won't take very long for people to figure out what's appropriate to broadcast and what isn't. I'd be happy if that were true. I think people can wallow in ignorance for a long, long time. I've seen it happen over and over. So I think if you wanna resist this, you'll be more than able to. I also don't think that the power here is so great and so obvious that you're gonna be out of business in 18 months if you don't do Enterprise 2.0. I would never ever say that. But when you look at any of these tools and the different organizational responses, the variation is just fantastic. There's another wonderful article in The Times just a while back about the student blogs at MIT where on the admissions office website at MIT, they have 11 student bloggers, undergraduates, and I was an undergrad at MIT. You cannot tell them to do anything. It's hurting cats. They let these people blog unfiltered, unedited, unreviewed, and they go out to the big broad outside world. To me, that's the mark of an extremely confident institution. The article talked to a bunch of other admissions officers who said, no, we're not really ready for that. So the spread and responses to these phenomenon is fascinating to me. That's why MIT won the balloon challenge. The balloon challenge. Absolutely. They know how to harness crowd energy. Good for them. Yeah. So there's this idea of the carrot with the stick. But I'm actually more curious if you have any stories from the research of changes in the power dynamic. Because the natural people who not only harness those tools but transcend in their job description, because it's one of those things they can feared, on some level. I mean, traditional centralized powers, it's the information comes from the top and it's there's always that person in the company who everybody knows who knows everything. And this gives them a forum to illustrate that. And it may transcend their actual role or their responsibility. And let me give you an optimistic story along those lines. I was doing my interviews at the CIA. And one of the people they brought in to talk to me was a very junior analyst who said, I went to CIA analyst school. And what you learn there is exactly how to sit in your cube by yourself with all the pieces of information you have access to in a great big Excel spreadsheet. And we teach you how to fill in the cells of that spreadsheet, come to a conclusion, and write the cable for your boss. So the guy said that that's what I got trained to do for the first X months here. And then he said, I heard about these weird Intellipidians and their five-day sabbatical program. So I went to it. And I realized this was a better way for me to go about my work. And in particular, they have a nice internal blogging environment. So if you blog, the entire community can see what you're doing if they have the right security no matter which of the 16 agencies they sit in. So the guy said, I started to blog about what I was seeing. And I think I can tell all these stories because it was not classified. He said, I study the theocracy in Iran. And my blog is called Iacola's R Us. And so I just started putting stuff out there what I was seeing. And I started to get a lot of traffic inside the community, because people evidently thought that what I was doing was interesting. My analysis was sound. My sources were pretty good. And I started to gain a lot of traffic inside the community. To me, that's exactly an example of someone transcending their formal job description and acquiring some kind of status in a big community. What I desperately hope is that that person's boss was OK with what they were doing. And at the time I did my interviews, the guy said, yeah, I've got support from my work group and my boss to do this. And I have the current board. Because that's I've done a little bit of research in this area and it's one of the interviews that I did. And that was the shift point, like people like Son. And yeah, it's easy because technology is part of their culture. But in other organizations, it came down to people would say to me, people aren't going to participate on a widespread basis until this becomes part of their job description. Or if they're rewarded based on this. Well, to your point, the one reason to be concerned about it would be in the old days, that would have gone to the greater glory of the boss. That would have been work. Here's my cable. Right. Over the boss's name. Yeah. So I think that's it. I was losing that, maybe, but maybe not. And I do think there's a lot of that going on and not to oversimplify too much. But one of the stereotypes you hear is that leadership and management in this era mean not hoarding and gatekeeping information, but showing how much of it you have by giving it away. I think there's a lot of truth to that. And inside the community, there are pockets of enlightened management and broad places where they're still back in the old school, which is why I see the very spotty kind of adoption going forward. What I don't know is how quickly these big organizations are going to change. They don't change that quickly. David, yeah? So you have a horse in this race. You sort of like Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 as do I. So if we take out of the business benefits, that's a big thing to take out. If we were to take out the efficiency. Why would we do that? Because I'm curious about what the residue is. What about either Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0, or maybe it's the web itself, has turned you into an enthusiast, maybe it's sort of political or cultural or personal. Is it simply that it's better for business? Is there some other aspect of the change that you touch on? I do like it, but that's neither here nor there. For my purposes as kind of an advocate and a researcher, I try not to care that these correspond with beliefs that I hold. I'm interested in helping organizations get more widgets out the door every day. So for example, I also did research and talked about the old style of enterprise information system, these big ERP systems, where you crank out business processes in a very standardized way. Those are not empowering or liberating or enlightening technologies, they're just not. They're tools for the man to put you in your place in the organization. I like those just fine as well, because they help you get more widgets out the door. I think they've been demonstrated to do that. So I hear your question about the residue. The residue here makes me happy instead of unhappy, but primarily, I'm about productivity and competition, not about the empowerment of the masses. So when the bank manager, you were interviewing the bank manager because he said, maybe we've been using some of these tools. You said, you said, fantastic. Yeah, because I'm a geek and I think tools are cool. But I hear your point. If he'd said we'd rolled out ERP, I don't think it would have said, oh, that's, wow, that's really exciting, you know? So like I say, I try to keep my beliefs about what organizations should be doing for people off to the side, because that's not my area of specialty. What I fundamentally like about these is that they help you get more widgets out the door. I think the icing on the cake for me is that they are also, I think inherently, like human kind of, I hate the word, empowering technologies. You look completely unhappy with that answer. No, I'm not completely unhappy at all. I sort of want to just do, push back one more time and then not, we're not there. Would your demeanor be the same? No, like I say, I think it is icing on the cake and I hadn't thought about this issue until you raised the question. I think these are cool from a technology standpoint because they're new and that's inherently kind of cool. What the technologists have done is really, really interesting. And what they have allowed people to do is pleasing to me. So yeah, I guess I do like that icing on the cake as well. But as you've read the book, what I think the book is tries to be about the cake, which is, this will help you with your business goals. The nice part is that your people might like it instead of dislike it. Okay, thanks, I like that question. Sir? I hope so. Will you say again, the widgets out the doors here? And we're going to hypothesize that the organizations that are going to most effectively use these tools in this whole culture are not really introducing widgets. And I think of companies, organizations we deal with, Boston Symphony, fascinating because in the last six years the amount of revenue from online line has gone from under 5% to almost 50%. And a lot of that is because there's a whole lot of communicating going on because you can choose your seats, you can listen to music, you can look at the views. Yeah, and I mean widget very, very broadly. It could be something that we bang on. I think, I haven't found the organization that would not benefit from the intelligent deployment of these tools. So whether they're old fashioned metal bashers or symphonies, I think these are almost universally valuable tools if you do them right. I don't know anyone who doesn't need to collaborate, share information and put people in touch with each other better, I just don't. So let me sharpen that point a little bit, Andy, but what are the measures? Is it cost savings, is it productivity, is it innovation, is it all of them? McKinsey for three years has been doing an enterprise 2.0 survey and they talked to about a thousand people every year. I'm going to have to be careful because people are self reporting the benefits and maybe they're talking to the internal evangelists anyway, so we need to be very careful looking at the results. But the latest round just came out a couple of months ago and the categories of benefit broke down into three. There were first of all kind of access to knowledge and expertise, so exactly what I was seeing inside the intelligence community. There's a satisfaction category which is both employee and customer and then finally there are these really, what I would call these heart outcomes of higher rates of innovation and greater productivity. The benefits that people reported obtaining were somewhere between 20 and 45% depending on which outcome you were looking at. Now I honestly have trouble thinking of what other corporate initiative you can embark on that would give you a 20% bump in any of those things in any kind of reasonable timeframe. So taking those results with the skepticism that's warranted is still pretty impressive results. So I find that a nice complement to the case studies that I've been writing which may or may not be generalizable. I look at enough different surveys that tell me there is something going on that is yielding real business benefits to the people who have gone some distance to it. Anyone who hasn't had a chance to talk yet. The side of it was been weirdly silent, yeah. There's a couple questions from people who are sitting online. I'll just give you two in the screen, but... Pick the softballs, please. You sort of addressed them in so few different ways here, so you probably agree with what you answered. But the first question was, someone was wondering if you've heard any reporting examples of rookies getting killed within companies themselves and I'll just give you the second one and see if we can actually join. The second question was, do you have any metrics as to the unstructured processes measured across different organizations? Yeah, so I think the McKinsey question is my best attempt to answer that one. I have not heard of rising efforts that got shut down by unenlightened managers. I think those examples are out there. I just don't have one to share firsthand. What I have heard of is we built it and nobody came and it's turned into some kind of digital wasteland and we looked at it after a while and said, what the heck are we wasting any of our time for? So they shut it off at that point. In other words, they hadn't found the right mix of stuff to activate more participation, so they killed the experiment, which is a valid outcome. I just wonder if they killed some of them without having done enough to give it a chance to succeed or give it enough effort and time. Yeah. Can you speak briefly more to not just the internal satisfaction, but your increased customer satisfaction? So if I, you can go look at the results and I've logged about them. I'm trying to remember the exact stats off the top of my head. I think somewhere around a third of the respondents said that they had experienced increased customer satisfaction and the median improvement was about 20%. Now, I find that really impressive given how hard it is to move the needle on customer satisfaction. I talked to some of the guys who put the survey together and they said that they used median because the mean was even higher and they didn't want to report the mean numbers because no one would believe them, basically. So I find that fairly encouraging. What are the most important differences between internal facing E2.0 and external facing E2.0? What are the biggest differences in how to implement one effectively, how to implement the other effectively, how to manage them effectively? And then also, just kind of like a tag along question, is do you see any companies that pursue one with more of the other? Boy, these are two nasty questions. We're just on a time like that. I personally see them more similar than different. I know other really well informed people who think that's ludicrous and think you do need to do two very different things. In particular, for external communities, you had better give people a pretty sharp reason to show up there and contribute their time, expertise, and whatever. So Verizon, by some means, tapped into that desire to be authoritative or to have status within the community. As you said, they deployed Lithium, which is a community technology that came out of the gaming industry, where one of the reasons we spend so many hours shooting each other in Halo is because we want to have a good score inside that community. So they tried to activate that same kind of energy. I think your tools to encourage people to come might be a bit fewer on the external facing stuff than on the purely internal stuff. The toolkit is probably smaller, but you have the advantage of bigger numbers as well. The other thing that we're starting to see is companies just mining the external environment, the tweet stream, the post stream, the blogosphere, to learn about themselves. And you can get bizarrely good information about your products and services and offerings by just looking at this world of buzz out there. I just read about a paper where some people from Texas were able to predict not only how well the Hollywood movie was going to open, but whether or not it was going to have any staying power over the subsequent weeks by looking at the tweet stream around that movie. If the tweet stream dropped off very quickly, so did revenues for the movie. Whereas if people kept saying, hey, I'm going to go see X and I hear it's a decent movie, nice indication you're going to keep seeing that stuff. So whether you're more internally or externally focused, why would you not try to profit from this stream of information that the world is giving you about yourself? So Twitter has a global predation market. Twitter is surprisingly good. I have another colleague at MIT who just wrote a paper where he found that Google searches are a better than decent predictor of housing price changes three months or six months down the road. So we already knew they were pretty good at tracking flu spread. It turns out you can look a little bit farther ahead of time and you'll find that people before they buy a house, they start looking for real estate agents and they don't go buy the house the next day. The actual purchase takes place a while later. You've got that nice timeline that you might be able to take advantage of. So there's this world of extraordinarily weird unstructured information where if you're intelligent or harvesting it, you can get some really good stuff out of it. Yeah, please. Wagon Redstrom has an advertising company and they built a product called Twins. Are you familiar with that? No. What Twins does is it analyzes the tweaks for positive, negative value and then gives you a real-time update on that. And you do that as part of a brain campaign. Interesting. That's exactly what the people at Texas were doing to understand how well movies were going to do. They classified tweets as positive, neutral, or negative and looked at both volume and mix of those kinds of things. Even more of that. There's a Harvard professor, Gary King, who measures the specific sentiment of positive, negative, neutral. He gets more of a fine-brained analysis. From, again, the tweet stream? Anything with digital name. Blocks with these Twins. Many of them. We have time for one more? Bring us home. It's been a decade or maybe two now since flattening the organization was a buzz phrase in the industry. But it's certainly the case that in the traditional organizational structure, one of the major functions of little management in the vision to take the credit for the work of the subordinates is to filter information. And one of the well-known phenomena of that is it filters the movement of bad information of the organizational hierarchy. Is it the case, do you think, that one of the inherent characteristics of the Enterprise 2 evolution is in the direction of flattening the organization? And doesn't that suggest, perhaps, that some of the biggest resistance to it is going to come from the soon-to-be disintermediate middle management structure that's used to control on that sort of information? So that absolutely is going on. The evidence is mounting that organizations are actually flattening out and have been doing so for a while. For basically the entire history of technology, you can look at a flattening and a spreading of the organization. I think it's due, in large part, to exactly what you talked about, which is technology is taking over a big part of the traditional role of middle managers, which is that upward filtering. And that took off like crazy, starting in the mid-'90s with the ERP revolution, where all of a sudden, if I want to report about what's going on very low in the organization, I don't pick up the phone. I tap, tap, tap, and I have this great view of what's going on all over the place. That gets rid of a big part of the role of the middle manager. Now, however, I can spiel on this because I just wrote a blog post about it, a lot of the technology enthusiasts take that argument way too far, and they say that middle managers are dinosaurs, basically. They're in an environment that doesn't need them anymore and is going to warm them out of existence or something. The reason that I honestly don't think that's going to happen at all is when you look at detailed studies about what middle managers do these days. And this is stuff that people like Dave Garvin at Harvard have been doing and Paul Osterman at MIT, two great scholars that go and look at what people do all day. What these middle managers do all day is run around from place to place, communicating with people, talking, putting up fires, expediting, settling little grievances and disagreements that go on. It's incredibly important work. It cannot, I don't see a way to shortcut by technology. And they're still referred to as the transmission belts of the organization. I would have thought that transmission belt function is largely obsolete in the age of technology, but the good, careful scholarship shows how important it still is. Should we stop there? Thank you very much. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you.