Doing Business in Real Time
About this Blog:
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Five Traits of an Agile Enterprise - Part 2
Entrepreneurial employees are the energy that makes an agile enterprise come alive
Most employees want a chance to learn more about their business and add their own ideas to the mix and make things better. They don’t want to be the kind of entrepreneur who strikes out all alone to create a new company from scratch; that’s more risk than most people want to take. What they desire instead is a chance to work with other motivated people and share in the benefits of growing the companies where they already work.
Entrepreneurial employees recognize that they either make money, bring in business, or support those who do. They know that when the company creates a job, it is an investment that must pay for itself, not an employee right or an entitlement. They will say, “I don’t want a penny unless I make money for the company!”
[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics - mhugos@yahoo.com ]
There are no performance reviews done solely by individual supervisors or managers because they are degrading to entrepreneurial employees and are usually mishandled or inaccurate anyway. Instead, employees are continually evaluated by their coworkers and managers based on their experience working together and the success of their entire work group in reaching its performance objectives. Peer group review among entrepreneurial employees provides far more motivation and guidance than individual performance reports ever could. And this peer group dynamic produces behavior that rewards all members of the group, not just selected individuals.
Entrepreneurial employees know that to be promoted, they do not need to show off how smart they are. They do not need to steal credit or attention from their coworkers. Instead, they need to display the attitudes and demonstrate the skills of the new positions they aspire to. Then their coworkers will acknowledge that they are ready to be promoted because it is evident that their promotion will be good for everyone; their promotion will help the whole unit be more productive and profitable (and help everyone earn higher bonuses).
What kind of systems and what kind of operating procedures would support this kind of employee? Hint: massively-multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or EVE Online are good examples of systems and procedures that encourage entrepreneurial behavior. IBM and a group of professors from Stanford and MIT did an interesting study of this titled “Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders”. I wrote about that study and its implications in an earlier post.
[Michael Hugos, principal at Center for Systems Innovaton [c4si], finding elegant solutions to complex problems; mentoring teams in agile development and strategies for business agility. His newest book is Business Agility: Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.]
Previous Post: Five Traits of an Agile Enterprise – Part 1 Next Post: Five Traits of an Agile Enterprise – Part 3
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
