From GigaOM Research:

I will be presenting one of the keynotes at the upcoming Social Now conference, 18-19 April 2013, in Lisbon. I am eager to go, not just because Lisbon is a wonderful city where I have old friends, but also because the event is very tool-focused. In fact, I am one of the few presenters not directly talking about tools.

So I thought I would share an abstract of the talk, and after the conference I will publish something longer, once I have heard what I have to say.

The Future Of Work In A Social World

The social revolution is still in its early days, but we have enough experience to have learned a bit, and to be able to conjecture even more. The arrival of social tools is one part of a larger, swirling mess of large-scale change smashing into our lives like a tornado, and tearing the roof off the world of business. The elements of that mess all influence each other — tech factors like digital, mobile, and the cloud, societal shifts like urbanization, new media, and the always-on lifestyle, and correspondingly massive stressors like climate change, globalism, the shifting social contract, and the boom/bust cycle of the world economy — these seem to be the new normal in the 21st century. The new normal is that there is no normal anymore. Welcome to the Postnormal.

We can be certain of little, but it’s safe to say that the future of work will be social (and other adjectives), and businesses that are becoming social are confronted by the need for deep cultural change, which is hard. The degree of difficulty depends on where you are starting from. I will present a new model of corporate culture, based on values and organization style, called the 3C model. [This will be the debut!] I think this will help us understand the nature of the change called for, what sorts of resistance is likely, and an end state:  the form factor of a social business.

In brief, we are seeing a transition from process-defined work, where tightly defined rules and narrowly constrained roles shape people working lives, and organize the company culture into a collective mindset, toward relationship-framed work, where people use creativity, innovation, and connection to determine how to accomplish increasingly nonroutine work, and where we see a shift to fast-and-loose cooperation from tight-and-slow collaboration.

I will talk about the tools and practices that are most relevant — and those that are missing — for this transition to move forward. And finally, some thoughts about what that future social world might feel like for its inhabitants.

4 April 2013 19 Permalink

I managed to get invited to Orchestra’s Mailbox launch — if you try to sign up today there are 433,636 people waiting — and the app kills. It implement the email triage I have been doing with external task management tools like Asana and Todoist for years. And it’s so fast because of the gestural interface.

Here’s ‘swipe left to snooze email’ —

— which leads to a second screen where you can quickly assign a day when the snoozed email should be returned to your inbox from the Gmail archive. Yes, it only works on Gmail accounts, and only runs on iOS, at the present time.

My bottom line from the piece at GigaOM Research:

Inbox triage has long been a necessary chore, but Mailbox makes it simple and intuitive. My bet is that Mailbox will be an enormous hit, and will become one of the apps that define and confirm the new gestural UX that we are moving into so quickly. Also, I am sure that all other email clients will knock off the principles of email triage à la Mailbox. I envision a browser version of this working PCs in combination with Leap Motion, but it’s killer as is, and for people on iOS devices it will quickly become the default mail client of choice.

Go read the whole post, if you want.

PS Apple should buy them immediately.

9 February 2013 6 Permalink

I posted this over at GigaOM Pro:

I think there is an important parallel between urban travel and social business. There is a now well-understood but counter-intuitive law in traffic engineering, called Braess’ paradox, where closing streets can lead to better traffic flow.

Linda Baker, Removing Roads and Traffic Lights Speeds Urban Travel

The brainchild of mathematician Dietrich Braess of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, the eponymous paradox unfolds as an abstraction: it states that in a network in which all the moving entities rationally seek the most efficient route, adding extra capacity can actually reduce the network’s overall efficiency. The Seoul project inverts this dynamic: closing a highway—that is, reducing network capacity—improves the system’s effectiveness.

[…]

It turns out that you don’t have to actually close streets off to cars to get these effects, you can institute what is called ‘shared streets’, where traffic lights and markings are removed, forcing drivers to operate on a more social basis: making eye contact with other drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians. These approaches share a common basis: movement in the system requires multilateral agreement. In Braess’ world, unilateral optimization is blocked, and in shared streets, social interaction is made necessary.

sourceEmily Badger

My belief is that this is quite like the adoption of social principles in business.

Go read the whole thing, where I lay out Boyd’s Law, among other things.

2 February 2013 27 Permalink

I review Crushpath, a new social selling tool (I hate the term ‘CRM’). The company was founded by Sam Lawrence, the former chief marketing officer at Jive, and is based around the ‘crushpath’, a visual metaphor for the give-and-take between sales people and the prospect.

While Crushpath is not contact-centric, obviously it allows saving and accessing leads, and generating and sharing projections, so it will fit in with the conventional sales processes in place in most companies, today. However, Crushpath clearly has one foot firmly planted in the new social, web-centric world of business, and aligns with the social logic that today’s sales professionals would like to use, given the right tools.

Go read the whole piece at GigaOM.

12 January 2013 2 Permalink

My review of ten team task management tools now available at GigaOM Pro, using a task model versus team model 10x10 grid approach:

• Top tier: Asana, Trello, Do, and Wrike
• Mid tier: Producteev, and Astrid
• Lower tier: Basecamp, Remember The Milk, Action Method Online, and Workflowy

Excerpt to give a sense of the analysis in the report:

Three offerings in the top tier — Do, Trello, and Asana — cluster together, with Wrike as an outlier. Do and Asana are competitive products, sharing common design metaphors as well as similar team and task models. Both scored an eight for having effective killer features, as did Trello. Trello has perhaps the most innovative user experience of all of these top-tier solutions. But the choice between those two user experience design approaches has to be left to the user, ultimately. Wrike, the outlier in this tier, is a somewhat less team-oriented tool but has the richest task model of all the products.

I think in future versions of this report I will a/ start with a larger group of products, b/ winnow down more aggressively, with one sentence or one paragraph characterizations of the lower tiers, and c/ provide in depth reviews of the top tier solutions, only.

9 January 2013 5 Permalink

Now Microsoft is only left with two instant messaging/video/voice solutions to juggle, Skype and Lync. One too many I think, so I am betting on Skype: the better brand.

9 January 2013 6 Permalink

I took a look at Blossom.io, a task management tool built around product development, incorporating as its major design premise the use of Kanban boards for projects.

Blossom.io makes the stages of a Kanban board the central motif of task-based coordination of work, which is a reasonable approach in product-centered work. Blossom.io is a lean and lightweight tool, a handsome member of the small and simple school of design.

Read the whole review at GigaOM.

19 December 2012 5 Permalink