In spite of this, I started to build up a network, to some extent unconsciously. I always saw colleagues and customers not only as such, but as personal relationships. For that reason, it seemed natural to keep in touch and meet up when alumni arrangements was organized.

When social media arrived, it also seemed natural to expand these relationships online, and it also offered the opportunity to get back in touch with more peripheral contacts. During the years at Wemind, I this process was accellerated significantly, as I learned more about how social networking can benefit your social capital.

After finally realizing in the fall of 2011 that the time had come to move on to the next level, this network proved to be of tremendous value. Let me summarize how the network has been beneficial in this process:

Leads: I have had access to internal information about career opportunities

Access: I have been able to get directly in contact with decision makers

Direct referrals: I have had former colleagues and customers recommend me directly to employers

Indirect referrals: My recommendations on Linkedin have been a great asset in the process

Advice: I have been fortunate to have a lot of supportive people around me, who have encouraged and advised me in the process

There is of course always an element of chance in whatever happens in your life, however, all is unlikely to happen without a dedicated and authentic interest in the people that you work with.

The good news is that it is almost never too late to start networking. They’re all out there…

The basic idea is that companies are competing for top talents, and therefore organizations need to brand them selves to existing employees and future candidates. The concept has spread across industries and sectors and is widely discussed and applied, along the pattern of many other “management fads”, refered to as institutional isomorphism by Dimaggio and Powell.

From a traditional marketing point of view, actitivites include analysing the employer brand, identifying the brand identity,  developing an overal Employer Value Proposition and communication plans to get the message across

A hidden assumption here is that organizations can choose how they want to appear in the eye of the candidates. But is that really possible these days? With social media and an increasingly networked workforce, the transparence of any organization is high.

There is no “quick fix” towards a strong employer brand, because in the real world, employer brands are formed through informal viral communication, or put in another way “word of mouth”.

As any marketing professional should know, “word of mouth” is the most powerfull kind of marketing that one can wish for – but can also have significant downsides if the organization is dysfunctional in one way or the other. Personal recommendations are key – not only in terms of products and services – but even more so when it comes to careers

Therefore, in my opinion, a good employer brand needs to be built up around employees own stories about what makes them motivated, what makes an organization a great place to work.

But what if these stories are not compelling? What if they are just ordinary tales without enthusiasm? Or even worse – what if the stories tell a tale of a dysfunctional, bureaucratic system, poor leadership etc?

Having a good and authentic story to tell is more important than ever these days, as people are increasingly buying products and services – not only based on there features, price, quality etc – but because of the associated values.

“Selling” your company based solely on the financial benefits and associated career opportunities, is certainly not a sustainable approach to employer branding, mainly because it includes only individual motivation – and also because it may not be durable during times of recession.

Therefore, effecient employer branding campaigns rely on the ability of the organization to provide a higher meaning – a general sense of purpose.

We live in what we believe is the peak of human civilisation, and yet very few can answer the question “why are we here”. As noted by Simon Sinek, facilitating organization wide reflection on the higher purpose of your company might be one of the most important thing you can do as a leader. As an example, Apples famous slogan “Think Different” encapsulates everything this company has been doing over the last decade, and has contributed to an incredible consumer brand as well as one of the strongest employer brands out there.

But even Apple has its counter stories. Steve Jobs – RIP – was also famous for his temper. Counterstories are not necessary a bad thing, if addressed properly, they can strengthen the sense of purpose as part of an ongoing process of learning and exploration and direction towards a higher meaning.

To summarise, a best practice approach to Employer Branding should include:

• Identifying the “why” of the organisation
• Involve the employees in interpreting “the why” in relation to their own work
• Ensure to remove any barriers to executing on “the why”
• Use authentic employee generated stories in the employer branding effort
• Use social media to share these stories
• Be prepared for counterstories and take full responsibility for addressing issues
• Organization cultures are not static – need to reemphasise the meaning and purpose of the organization on an ongoing basis

But one – often overlooked – aspect of the new media reality is the steep increase in distractions and alerts. Calendar alerts. Email alerts. Social network alerts. App alerts. Task management tool alerts. SMS reminders. And so on…

Science tells us that everyday, we are hit by 11 million bits of information / second. On average, we capture around 50 bits of this information. And everytime we get distracted, it will take 2-4 minutes before we get back on track. And 40% of the time, we never get back to what we were doing, after a distraction!

A lot of people are struggling with this, and only some seem to be aware about it. Symtoms include:

• Constantly checking the mobile phone
• Multitasking in meetings
• Frequent rescheduling of meetings
• Overdue tasks
• Signs of stress and illness
• Memory glitches – “Ups, I forgot”

At Wemind we are currently running a special organizational development program (Digital Rehab) in collaboration with Mark Mayland.

The aim of the program, which is also a Wemind service offering, is to target the time management challenges and help organizations improve employee efficiency.

The program has three key principles:

• Plan your focus
• Make conscious decisions
• Test your self

“Planning your focus” is about taking charge of your day, rather than letting the day take charge of you. In practical terms, spending time in the morning reviewing and updating your todo list, is time well spent.

“Making conscious decisions” is about taking charge of your situation, rather than letting the situation taking charge of you.

“Test your self” implies a reflective consciousness of your progress.

When it comes to tools and systems – we are recommending a radical approach.

• Use only one system for task management
• Switch off all alerts
• Put your phone on silent, unless you are expecting a specific call
• Check mails and social networks only 1-2 times during the day, unless you have a specific task to do that includes these media
• An empty inbox – convert mails to tasks or archive them

However, these guidelines are only a small part of the program. In order to achieve efficiency, you need to understand how to break down and plan tasks the right way, how to make good meeting minutes and how to deploy these rules in a team.

For a consulting company, the benefits are obvious as we are basically selling our time to the customers. But all kinds of organizations can benefit from it – organization cultures are influenced in a very positive way, when people are on top of, an not burried under  - their diaries.

Although it has been demonstrated by Martin and others that organizational culture is something fluid and ambiguous, most management advisors and consulting firms continue talk about culture changes as something that can be designed and configured by planned interventions. No wonder that most programs intending to “roll out” new values fail miserably!

If organizational cultures are in fact fluid and ambigious, perhaps we should not talk about culture change, but culture development. Rather than trying to enforce certain values or behaviors, but to bring the organization in to a “reflective” state in which managers and employees are involved in an ongoing dialogue about what is required to meet complex and dynamic demands.

There are two key dimensions that can either support or inhibit a reflective culture – performance management systems and management behaviors.

Based on my experience, flawed performance management systems contributes to the majority of failed “culture change” projects. In other words, if employees are measured on their individual contribution only, there is a likelyhood that you will get a bunch of ego-centric divas with razorblades on their elbows – no matter how soft and fuzzy the official corporate values may be. One classic example is a major software and services company, striving to introduce a “trusted advisor” concept across the organization. However, they continued to measure the sales staff only on their ability to close contracts, which incited them to continue to oversell in terms of unrealistic promises and underperform in terms of selling profitable work. The outcome was disappointed customers and high stress rates among project managers, who were never able to meet their targets.

Another key component is management behaviors. Managers need to be ready to improve own behaviors, admit mistakes and support employees in their development process with everything they say and do. If managers consider themselves “above” or “exempt” from the values framework, why would employees bother? In deed, “living” other values than management would be a dangerous move.

As a summary, three key dimensions to consider for cultural development projects:

• Culture is an ongoing process, and should be managed as such
• Aligned performance measures are key to success
• Management need to demonstrate the aspired behaviors in everything they say and do

Measured on these dimensions, how reflective is your organization?

(Illustration by Matthias Rosenkranz)

At Wemind, we don’t have one corporate hymn – we have a whole playlist on Spotify. One frequently played track is “Wild Boys” with Duran Duran:

“Wild boys never lose it
Wild boys never chose this way
Wild boys never close your eyes
Wild boys always shine”

All though the song is more than 25 years old now, it still has a strong sense of youthfullness and optimism to it – about being comfortable on the edge and not being afraid of challenges. And yes, we do have some pretty wild girls as well.

Yesterday, I attended a price ceremony at Copenhagen Business School. Before the ceremony, a wonderful quire performed “Man in the Mirror” by Michael Jacksson in front of the attendies.

I am not sure whether it was a random choice, but I believe it is well suited for CBS current transformation process (and for many other organizations as well). It emphasizes the fact that organizational change starts and ends with individual commitment:

“I’m Starting With The Man In
The Mirror
I’m Asking Him To Change
His Ways
And No Message Could Have
Been Any Clearer
If You Wanna Make The World
A Better Place
Take A Look At Yourself, And
Then Make A Change”

No message could have been any clearer… so what is your Corporate Hymn?

So did I learn anything? I certainly think it was useful to get “the unfiltered” version of Mr Snowdens thinking directly from the source. Also, it was good to get some confirmation of the basic principles upon which we base our work at Wemind.

For me, some of the most important points were the following:

• Dissent and conflict are essential to weak signal detection, and it also stimulates creativity. This is an important thing to consider in open processes, in order avoid “The dumbness of the Crowds”. And in extension to this, the importance of creating a culture that allows for experimentation and mistakes
• Rituals (and action in general) is the most efficient mean to change behaviour. Again, it has a lot of implications for how you work with clients
• The purpose of strategy is not about finding universal solutions – neither is it about scenario planning. It is about defining purposeful initiatives based on collective intelligence – and having amplification measures in place to leverage the successful ones.

The latter have direct implications for project charters and contracts. Why pretend that we know an outcome that is utterly uncertain? Project owners should consider using amplification and recovery strategies to build in this uncertainty to their plans, rather than relying on over-optimistic business cases.

Labour unions is a key part of democracy. The right to assemble and fight for better conditions for employees is still very relevant. Nevertheless, unions all over the western world are struggling to attract and retain members. And as demonstrated recently by the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, politicians are increasingly putting forward proposals to limit these hard owned rights in the name of global competition.

So do labour unions have a future? I think so. But not in its traditional form only. Labour unions tend to be very centralised and bureaucratic when it comes to decisionmaking. They seem to be more concerned about retaining their rigid bureaucratic structure, than to engage and involve. The are preoccupied with internal processes and meetings, rather than developing and leveraging their collaborative potential: And by doing this, they loose their legitimacy.

Labour unions could learn a lot from social networks. Social networks are open and involving. They are time and place indpendent, and members can contribute when and how they want to. Social networks are not limited by “political” concerns of their leaders – as leaders are not chosen but incrementally appear from the crowds as a result of “earned” social capital. And Social Networks don’t wait for someone else to make decisions or negotiate better conditons for them.

If unions start to embrace some of these principles, there is a good chance they will gain influence and members. But they have to start now. 2020 may be to late.

As is widely known, Facebook started in the university environment in response to the need foor students to collaborate, share and socialize. Ironically, the adoption of collaborative tools within core educational tasks has been much slower. In many universities, solutions based on Moodle have been rolled out – but often in restricted or outdated versions that do not provide teachers and students with realtime interactive tools that support faster and better learning. According to my own experience from CBS and ITU, and what I hear from others in my network.

I have decided to pursue my own social experiments this year, the “victims” being two teams of first year B.A students at CBS. They have grown up with the internet and rely mostly on Facebook for communication.

We will be trying the following:

• Virtual brainstorming
• Collaborative note-taking (wiki)
• Action-learning documented on video
• Using a facebook-group for distributed communication during case studies

What else should we be trying?

What are your experiences? Do you know of any success stories within this area? What tools do you use for learning in you organization?

Empowerment is not anarchy. Empowerment is about delegation of authority and enabling of responsible action at the right time
We are living in a complex world: Globalization, Fragmentation, Technological Distruption and Economic Volatility. The only viable strategy is to involve and enable collaboration to create ideas and solve problems

Empowerment and influence is closely related. The more you empower, the more trust is created. The more trust, the higher is the total sum of influence. Thus, managers who empower and involve efficiently actually gain influence (Kanter 1979)

The fact that empowerment creates motivation is well known. People are highly motivated, when they can influence their work, and see the direct results. (Hackmann & Oldham)

Empowerment creates trust, and trust creates an open and network oriented culture. This is a retention parameter, that is very difficult to compete with

10 years ago, one of the key benefits of joining a large corporation, was that you would receive a nice laptop, a good mobile phone and have access to a lot of updated software. Today your experience is that you get an outdated phone, a slow computer and for security reasons, be constrained from using all the creative tools you use at home.  So the private sphere is better equipped than the corporate when it comes to communication tools and knowledge sharing. This change creates new challenges for communication managers

The fact that employees of today are very skilled and well equipped communicators, means that communication management as we know it has to change. Rather than producing and controlling formal communications, the most important role of a communications department is to facilitate the community, to support effective informal communications. What we need is a shift from communications management to community management.

Thanks to Rasmus Schjødt Pedersen (Concept Development & Planning), Tommy Bünger (Visual Identity) and Daniel Larsen (Editorial).