Month: October 2012

Adapted from, based on and inspired by…..

I’m a very lucky man. As I approach middle age, I have come to know and appreciate the incredible blessings and privileges I have. I was born into a warm and wonderful family: my parents and grandparents, my brother and sisters, my aunts, uncles and cousins, my extended family. I spent time at some fabulous educational institutions (Miss P.Hartley’s, St Xavier’s Collegiate School, St Xavier’s College). I’ve worked for some fantastic companies, and I’m now in my dream job, at Salesforce.com. I’m part of a lively and courageous church, Kings Church International. And all through those years, I’ve had the joy of making many fast friends, great friends, rare friends.

I’m a very lucky man. My wife of 28 years, an incredible woman, has put up with me and stayed with me through thick and thin, and has brought up three warm and beautiful children, occasionally with my help, often without, sometimes despite. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

I’m nearly 55. There have been a few glitches along the way: I was picked up at Red Square without a visa in 1982, and faced the consequences; I was beaten and kicked into a coma when I was 25, by a large bunch of skinheads; drowned in Greece a few years later, only to be rescued by passing fishermen as I floated serenely; was paralysed briefly in 1999 after an accident; turned white briefly in 2004, as I passed kidney stones the hard way; went very briefly into ventricular fibrillation in 2006, became bionic; and a few months ago, was found to have a walnut-sized growth in my colon, which has since parted company with me, to mutual satisfaction.

A few glitches along the way.

Yes, I’m a very lucky man. I know something about God’s grace in my life, and I’m grateful. I know a lot about the warmth and support of my family and friends, and I’m grateful. Incredibly grateful.

Besides my family and my friends and my teachers, there have been a number of people, places and things that have influenced me heavily. They number in their hundreds, if not in their thousands. Authors, playwrights and poets; cartoonists, illustrators and artists; singers and songwriters and musicians; comedians; thinkers and doers. Foods. Poems. Books. Films.

They’ve all bent me, shaped me, helped make me what I am.

I can’t share all of them: life doesn’t work that way. I can’t digitise and scale out my family or my friends: for one thing, not all of them are alive. Besides, it isn’t possible for me to replicate them, to clone them, to share them with you. [Yes, I realise I can share my memories, my learnings, my recordable past with you, but somehow I’m not ready for that right now. Maybe another time. Anyway, you get glimpses of those through this blog].

Some of the influences are shareable. Some of them have written things, performed things, participated in things, things that have been published at least in analog form, often in digital form. Influences that you can read, listen to, watch. Some influences that can even be eaten.

Influences that made me me, alongside my family and friends and education and experience.

Influences that I’d like to acknowledge publicly, because at least in some part the things I think about and share are adapted from, based on and inspired by the people on the list below. It’s not an exhaustive list — my intention is to publish them in what I expect are three sections, so here are the first 171.

I hope you find the list useful, I guess it’s a variant of what used to be called a blogroll.

 

It’s not an exhaustive list. And as I said it will be added to over time. I hope you enjoy finding out why every one of the 171 are on my list of influences. Let me know what you think.

Continuing to muse lazily about sharing at work

I spend a lot of time thinking about sharing, and sharing what I’m thinking. Why? I don’t quite know. Maybe it comes from having been born in Calcutta. Or maybe because I was (and still am) part of a large family. Or even maybe it’s because my father was a journalist as was his father, while my other grandfather was a professor.

Around eight months ago I wrote a post headlined Lazily Musing About Sharing. In it, I made the following assertions:

  • For anything to be social, it must be shared
  • Sharing, the act of making social, happens because people are made social
  • Sharing is encouraged by good design
  • When you share physical things like food, sharing reduces waste
  • When you share non-physical things like ideas, sharing increases value

Since I wrote that post, I’ve been spending time observing how people share: my colleagues at salesforce.com, our customers, our partners, my personal and professional networks.

And coming to a number of hypotheses which I intend to share with you over the next few months….. depending, of course, on the kind of feedback I get on this post.

Here’s the first hypothesis:

When the shared purpose at work is itself to do with sharing, collaboration becomes part of the DNA

Why do I say this? For a number of reasons:

When I joined Salesforce.com one of the first things I noticed was that there was a culture of sharing, above and beyond the architecture of sharing that services like Chatter provide. People felt comfortable sharing things, it seemed to be in their very spirit. Was it because of something about the way we hired people? Was it because senior management set an example in leadership? Was it because we were still a relatively young company? Was it something in the air?

It seemed to be something deep-seated, something systemic. So I kept looking.

It may have been all of the reasons I stated earlier. I don’t know the precise reason, I’m still learning. But more and more I’m coming to the conclusion that it has to do with the principles the company was founded on, the principles we’ve adhered to since, which involve a new business model (subscriptions), a new technology model (the cloud)…..

….. and a new philanthropy model. 1+1+1.

I’d read about the Salesforce Foundation before I joined the company. I’d seen how people set aside time and effort and money to support the Foundation. I’d been very impressed by how central a role Foundation activities played in corporate life, not just at corporate events. I’d been pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm shown by staff, customers and partners alike when it came to participating in Foundation events and activities.

More recently, I’d been overwhelmed by the support given to an initiative very close to my heart, Byte Night. 20 of my colleagues sleeping out with me. Over 300 individual donors supporting our team. Colleagues, customers, partners, the lot. All underpinned by the advice, guidance, support — and generous matching funds — from the Foundation.

And when I was awake, cold, dripping wet, that night, accompanied by my colleagues, I realised how deep the bonds were between those colleagues. How deep the bonds were between all of us as sleepers that night, regardless of where we worked.

Those shared experiences of altruism, of philanthropy, of giving, matter. They are analogous to the social objects that Jyri Engestrom conceived of, that Hugh MacLeod popularised.

The relationship between the level of collaboration at work and a collaborative worldview is by itself not new:  Howard Rheingold has written about this many times; in his latest book he speaks of what Mimi Ito called “genres of participation”, some interest-driven, some friendship-driven. When people work together on philanthropic activities, I think these two genres come together, dramatically increasing the level of energy in the activity. Amy Jo Kim, in Community Building On The Web, emphasises the importance of giving people tools to build and operate their own subcommunities, to embed rituals in what they do, to have cyclic events. Christopher Locke spoke of the importance of shared pursuits like “organic gardening” in Gonzo Marketing. John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison talk about the importance of shared purpose in The Power of Pull, particularly when it comes to designing “creation spaces” in order to get the increasing-returns value from the “collaboration curve”.

What I didn’t realise deeply enough was this: when the shared purpose is itself about sharing, then collaboration becomes part of the DNA.

Life is never smooth; that holds true at work as much as anywhere else. Historically, reinforced by hierarchical structures, information has been seen as power, and as a consequence collaborative attitudes have been weakened. Often this has been exacerbated by individual rather than team-based incentive systems, opaque performance management systems and, sadly, not infrequently, rampant briefing-blame cultures.

As the saying goes, character is not about the problems you face, but about the responses you make to those problems. The time when problems occur at work is probably the most important time for people to collaborate. But it isn’t easy to do.

Of course it helps if leaders set an example.

Of course it helps if, as Tim O’Reilly stated, there is an “architecture of participation“.

Of course it helps if performance management and reward mechanisms are tuned to recognise and reward collaborative activity.

My gut feel, however, is that these are all necessary-but-insufficient conditions for true collaboration at work.

The economic climate, the pace at which markets move, the consequences of the Big Shift on barriers to entry, competition and margins,  the nature and complexity of the problems we face today as humans, as a society, as humanity — all these militate towards a greater need for collaboration.

But then we have to go beyond the necessary-but-insufficient conditions, towards the kind of model Marc Benioff talks about, where philanthropy becomes a shared value at the heart of the company.

Then and only then will true collaboration take place within and beyond the firm.

That’s what I think. Let me know whether you agree, what needs changing, what I’ve got wrong.

[A coda: Just saw friend Don Thorson of Swipp share a John Maxwell quote that I thought was relevant to this post: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.]