The New York Times ‘Corner Office’ interview on January 16 was with Cristóbal Conde, the CEO of the Fortune 500 IT services company SunGard. I found it fascinating for two reasons. First, Conde spends the first portion of the article talking about Enterprise 2.0, and about how and why he’s tried to increase the amount of freeform and emergent collaboration at his company. Below are a few of his quotes on the topic, followed by links to related posts from this blog.

Second, I liked hearing what he had to say on other topics as well. The final three quotes below aren’t directly related to E2.0; I just wanted to include them because I think they’re really sharp.

• Organizational Structure. “I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.” -I wrote about this in “The Great Decoupling“
• Fostering Collaboration. “a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration… You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?” – see this 3-post sequence on Enterprise 2.0 ratings for knowledge workers.
• Peer Effects. “The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart… recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor… By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.” – “Three Mantras“
• The Utility of Microblogging. “One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer… because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.” – I wrote about microblogging’s attributes and many uses in  “17 Things We Used to Do.”
• How Command-and-Control Breaks Down. “Early on, I was very command-and-control, very top-down. I felt I was smart, and that my decisions would be better. I was young, and I was willing to work 20 hours a day… The last year I did that, I was away from home 302 nights, not including day trips. I had to fly around all over the place making all the decisions. And I would walk in, make an uninformed decision, get on the next plane, go somewhere else and repeat the process. I look back at that year; I don’t think I got anything done.” – I particularly like Conde’s insight that he was making uninformed decisions when he was working in this mode.
• Micromanagement. “If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement… Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down. [T]he trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them.” – Lovely. His job is to develop people, not meddle or second-guess. And he concentrates his efforts a bit lower down in the organization.
• The Importance of Writing Ability.”English is my second language, and I write reasonably well. I don’t see very much excuse for people not to be able to write well. I just don’t.” – I can’t tell you how happy I was to read this

What else did you like about the Conde Interview? Was there anything he said you didn’t like? And what other excellent executive interviews have you come across recently?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I’ve just been looking over the 40+ comments left in response to my post “The S Word,” which was about leading with the word ’social’ when talking about the benefits and possibilities offered by Enterprise 2.0. And I’m just blown away by the thoughtfulness and careful thinking on display, as well as the civility and respect for others’ positions. It’s one of those instances where the comments far surpass the post itself, and it’s become my exhibit A for how 2.0 technology like a blog can generate discussion and knowledge from a heterogeneous and highly dispersed group.

I strongly encourage you to look through these comments; they’re a great way to get up to speed on the state of the debate on what’s going on, and what to call it. A number of people made the point that when engaging in marketing, education, sales, and outreach efforts 2.0 advocates need to use language that will resonate with the target audience. To the extent that ’social’ resonates, then, use it by all means, and avoid using it when it doesn’t. I particularly liked Gia Lyons’ image of a tag cloud of marketing words. ‘Social’ is absolutely part of this tag cloud, and in my original post I was cautioning against overusing it, not against using it at all.

A second main thread in the comments concerned how we 2.0 enthusiasts talk about the phenomenon not with those we’re seeking to bring on board, but rather among ourselves. In other words, do we agree that a social revolution is taking place in business today? That corporate hierarchies are being replaced by self-organizing and -governing networks?

If they are, I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen plenty of examples where formal org structures have been supplemented by informal ones (whether tech-enabled or not). It’s also quite common for formal, pre-defined business processes to be supplemented by ad hoc and emergent ones, especially when the formal ones aren’t working perfectly.

Every time this happens, it’s social. But it’s not revolutionary. It’s not even new.

What would be new is a trend of companies throwing out altogether their org charts, management hierarchies, reporting relationships, job titles and descriptions, formal roles and responsibilities, review and promotion processes, and other aspects of classic, old-as-the-hills organizational structure and replacing them with an entirely new social contract. I’ve not seen or heard of a single example of this taking place.

I’ve certainly seen some recent complements to classic org structure. These include Google’s 20% time, Cisco’s deliberate push to become more collaborative, and the abandonment of formal vacation policies by Hubspot, Crowdcast, and Netflix (disclosures at end of post). I think these are innovative, cool, and laudable. They come from enlightened leadership and are made possible in part by modern technology. But none of these companies, as far as I’m aware, has abandoned any of the classic elements of org structure listed in the previous paragraph. None of them, in other words, is using the social as a wholesale substitute for the formal.

I’m aware that Wikipedia has none of these elements (except for a process to promote editors to the ranks of administrator and beyond). But Wikipedia is not a company; it’s a Web collective. When companies start deliberately refashioning themselves as Web collectives I’ll start to believe that there’s a social revolution taking place in business. Until then I’ll keep repeating that Enterprise 2.0 is not THAT big a deal.

Am I missing something? Do you know of existing companies that are throwing out all or most of the aspects of org structure listed above and replacing them with a configuration that’s entirely (or at least largely) amorphous and emergent? I don’t, but I’d love to learn of them.

I love William Gibson’s insight that “the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” In my field research I’ve seen a business future in which the social / collaborative / informal / emergent is a larger complement to the impersonal / regimented / formal / planned than it is at present. I think this is a great thing, but I don’t think it’s a social revolution. I’d love to see early indicators of a more revolutionary future if they’re out there. Please show them to us…

(Disclosures: I have no financial interest in Google, Cisco, Hubspot, or Netflix. I am on the advisory board of Crowdcast, and have a small amount of stock in the company. Cisco is a sponsor of the Center for Digital Business at MIT, where I work. Brain Halligan, CEO of Hubspot, is a friend of mine who has invited me to Red Sox games)

Over the past few days I’ve read posts by Timothy Gowers on his polymath project and by Lewis Shepard on the most recent failure to connect the dots among available pieces of intelligence in order to head off a terrorist attack. The posts themselves are excellent, but what really struck me was how thoroughly both authors responded to comments on their blogs.

As Julien Le Nestour and others have pointed out, this is not something I’ve done. I’ve always considered comments important and actively solicited them in most posts, but have rarely responded directly to them. I’ve considered them a way for folk to air their ideas rather than to engage in a dialogue with me.

I see now that this was shortsighted, and that interacting with commenters is a great way to make a blog more dynamic and valuable for its readers. So my resolution for 2010 is to be a more active responder to what others are saying here. I can’t promise that I’ll reply to every comment, but I will reply to more of them.

How can I best do this? What advice do you have about how to respond well to blog comments? Leave a comment, please; I’ll use it as an opportunity to start practicing… 

And Happy New Year!