You're probably familiar with the concept of Dunbar's number. The Wikipedia entry defines it as a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.

This number is set at 150 connections. Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained."

Not every company caps the number of customers at 150, however. Which means that if they indeed intend to have relationships with their customers (beyond the sales person closing the deal) they need to scale up the number of people who support customers. Each of those people counts personal relationships - family, friends, past colleagues, peers, etc. - in their Dunbar number.

Theoretically, there is a correlation between the customer relationships a company hopes to have, and the number of people dedicated to cultivating those relationships. However, as Doc Searls said so well a few years back, companies are not doing that. Because "Customer Relationship Management" is about management more than customers.

This is one data point.

Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says: “People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle.’”

Which means that since many more people are online these days, there are many more chances they will broadcast their experiences to others. People who are online can also be your customers. When people are introduced to a system where everyone has amplifiers, there may be less relationships, not more.

However, the weak ties in our network have a role and function.

As author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi explains in Linked: “Weak ties play a crucial role in our ability to communicate with the outside world ... [our friends] move in the same circles we do and are inevitably exposed to the same information. To get new information we have to activate our weak ties. The weak ties ... obtain their information from different sources than our immediate friends.”

This is a second data point.

Where is all this leading you? Perhaps you should organize your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system around social. Today at Fast Company Expert blog we explore the question can you just add a "stay in touch" function to your customer relationships management (CRM) to make it social? Will that make it more about customers, thus social, than management?

While we consider and explore the possibility that technology could give us the ability to keep up with it all, I think there is a good alternative for companies that wish to be in service of their customers. It's called community. It takes care of Dunbar's number, and it comes with its own challenges.

First of which is the community size. You need to have critical mass in order to have enough member diversity - some will engage actively, some will watch on the sidelines, some will be somewhere in between.

From my on work with groups in school, I can tell you that between 5-7 per group is a good number. Conversations that help bridge across groups, or even help groups rotate should help with expanding relationships and broadening the trust base within the community.

For a community to sustain itself you want also to have good participation among members. That's why it's often smart to have a community facilitator. Because customers are the lifeblood of your business, this is potentially a c-role, as Connie Bensen explains.

Community shouldn't be just for the brand. It should be in service of its customers.

I used to create the content for the speaking tracks at a yearly Rendez-vous we organized at a boutique consulting firm where I worked. I just came back from a customer conference - 300 were in attendance. I had the good fortune of meeting many for the first time in person, which still makes a tremendous difference in relationships.

The event was aptly named, the future is now. There has never been a better time to make the case for customer community. And yes, your company or business should have a Chief Customer Advocate. I'd go so far as saying that this position should be in the marketing group. Which may be interesting for companies that have sales and marketing reporting into the same person.

There's plenty to think about when it comes to community. Have you built or facilitated a community or a social network? Do you consider them the same thing? Why/why not?

[a graphical representation of the Dunbar's number. A group photo from The Future is Now] 

Source: Conversation Agent

The IT Leader's Hero Quest

Rising star Jim Barton has decidedly mixed feelings after being selected as the new chief information officer at the fictional IVK Corporation. On the one hand, he lacks an IT background; on the other, he's ambitious and up for a challenge. And a challenge it is: When Barton takes over as CIO, his company badly needs a jolt of energy and expertise to grow and to resuscitate its declining stock price. The chief executive who promoted Barton is hopeful but hard-nosed; and Barton's IT group—while talented and tech-savvy—is impatient, even borderline dysfunctional. So begins Barton's wild ride and ultimately an excellent journey to learning effective leadership skills in The Adventures of an IT Leader (Harvard Business Press).

According to the novel's creators, a fictional approach allowed them to blend real-life incidents they had encountered as managers, consultants, and educators working with a diverse set of companies.

"In this way, we could pool all this knowledge and distill it down to the essential principles that CIOs can generally apply, regardless of industry or size of firm, while describing 'realistic' and recognizable situations."

Co-writers Robert D. Austin and Richard L. Nolan are professors at Harvard Business School while Shannon O'Donnell is a consultant with Cutter Consortium's Innovation Practice and a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School. The three teamed up via email for the following Q&A. An excerpt from The Adventures of an IT Leader appears afterward.

Martha Lagace: It's a clever idea to tell your story through the fictional character of Jim Barton, a fledgling CIO. Why describe CIO challenges through fiction?

Rob Austin, Dick Nolan, and Shannon O'Donnell: Our decision to use fiction opened up a host of opportunities for inviting reader engagement. For the professionals, our story of Jim Barton often mirrors their own life experience, and has prompted many real CIOs to say to us "this is my life," "this book is about me," even (from one) "how did you find out about this?" The story also provides a context apart from the complexity and sensitivity of their own company; this allows executives to engage in important discussions about, for example, risk trade-offs and relationships with peers, subjects that might be too sensitive in their own company contexts.

For the student who nowadays has a host of dynamic multimedia material competing for his or her attention, we wanted to create a high-quality, engaging classroom experience. Both plot and character development in the book are inspired by a popular storytelling structure called "the hero's journey" that is used widely in the writing of popular film scripts like The Matrix or Star Wars. Character behaviors, actions, and motivations hook the interest of readers at all levels, regardless of their professional experience with IT, while the plot sets up a series of expectations that keep the reader curious and invested in the story. We've had students at undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels telling us that they couldn't stop reading because they were eager to know what would happen next.

In addition, chapters of the book are designed like teaching cases, built around key decisions the CIO must make. Students are invited to walk in the shoes of the CIO and become active participants in making these decisions and creating new knowledge about IT leadership through classroom discussion and debate.

We want to send the signal that this is a different kind of reading and learning experience. Our publishing team at Harvard Business Press, led by the talented Kathleen Carr, had been generating a host of innovative ideas that naturally aligned with this book's innovative format—the use of artistic illustrations was their suggestion, and we were thrilled to make them a part of the book, in line with our strategy to engage a broad audience through telling an interesting and important story being played out in twenty-first-century organizations.

Q: What makes a CIO job the most volatile, high-turnover job in business? How important is CIO leadership for the future success of companies?

A: Early in our careers at the Harvard Business School, we discovered that the turnover of CIOs ran at around 30 to 40 percent per year. As a result of our research, we described the driving cause as the rapid change of IT through the operation of Moore's Law (IT cost halving every 18 months or so), which we thought would be short-lived. But when we looked at the turnover rates again a few years later, we discovered the rate was about the same, but the driving cause was more than just the rapid change in IT: It was also because IT was the nexus of major organizational change, the key enabler of business process redesign.

Over the years, the CIO job has remained a hot seat in business and has, in turn, become a key management position in executing a company's competitive cost structure and strategy. It has become a key senior management position that can enable companies to transform their twentieth-century industrial organization structures to twenty-first-century information-based organization structures.

Q: In your novel, though Barton had been willing to critique his predecessor for constantly fighting fires, he found himself facing the same dilemmas. Did it actually help him as CIO to know relatively little about IT?

A: Among a few key differences between the management styles of Jim Barton (trained as a general manager) and his predecessor Bill Davies (trained as an IT specialist), the most important is arguably in their approach to managing relationships. Davies focused where he was strongest—on his relationship to the IT department—and tended to retreat into the IT "basement" in times of conflict with business units and senior management. Barton paid attention to his staff, while at the same time more effectively managing communication with his peers and the CEO, making more explicit business arguments for IT in the context of senior leadership meetings, and inviting the CEO and partners into important, risk trade-off decisions. An important lesson Barton learns over the course of the novel, after rashly seizing control of IT project prioritization, is the importance of including business-side managers in certain key decisions so that all are invested in a successful outcome.

In other words: Successful IT strategy and management is now extremely dependent on collaboration with the senior management team and the IT team. In the twenty-first century, IT has become a "participative sport" for the senior management team, rather than a "spectator sport." Barton was persistent in making the senior management play IT as a participative sport. Davies wasn't.

In the structure of the hero's journey, Davies is someone Barton must come to understand in order to surpass. In the course of the story, Barton first rejects Davies' management approach, then in a more mature fashion, finds ways to "get into the skin" of his opponent, incorporate the useful perspectives he has to offer, and find ways to make new choices based on an understanding of why Davies failed.

Q: The crisis section we are excerpting at the end of this interview is about coping with a sudden denial of service attack. It's also about Barton navigating around conflicting advice while preparing for a meeting with Wall Street analysts in which he must put his best face forward. Barton's CEO is particularly tough. How common is it for a CIO to be caught in the middle, and have you any general guidelines for navigating similar circumstances?

A: We think this situation facing Jim Barton represents the essence of a difference between successful twentieth-century senior executives and twenty-first-century senior executives. Much more frequently, today's senior executives are confronted with situations with multiple uncertainties, requiring collaboration and judgment from experts who know more than they do about many aspects of the situation. Much more frequently also, there is less time for making important decisions—not infrequently, they have to act in real time. With modern IT (with real time, Internet search, and social networks), few decisions can be made in secret, and even fewer can be kept secret. While the CEO is on the ultimate "hot seat," the pressure to provide the analysis and judgment spills over to the senior executive team members, and, in this case, the CIO.

Our advice to CIOs and other senior executives is to build a foundation of trust with a well-rounded management team ensuring that strong management capabilities reside in the team, and that great technical expertise is accessible to the team. Be prepared, and not surprised, by this kind of decision-making. In addition, ensure that all decisions are executed in the context of a deep ethical code reflecting sound values.

Without giving away an important twist in the plot concerning Barton's decision and advice to the CEO, later in the book we have a reflective discussion between the CEO and Barton about the motivations of the CEO as he took some controversial actions of which Barton disapproved. This late chapter provides further insight into the character of the CEO and allows Barton to "walk in the shoes" of the CEO to see from his perspective why he didn't follow Barton's recommendation.

Q: Barton seems to accept and perhaps appreciate the different personalities and work styles in his group. How much of effective CIO leadership has to do with the people side of managing?

A: We think there are work styles unique to certain tasks in IT organizations. Chapter 3 explores one difference: the need to sometimes include input from specialists when making key management decisions, given that managers often can't keep up with the high-speed technological advances their employees master, and that so much of the work is difficult to observe.

Chapter 15 of the book deals specifically with considerations necessary for managing highly talented employees, who produce great value for the organization but may go about it in ways that test normal work-day structures or departmental rules and cause internal conflict. With insight offered from professional jazz musician Carl Størmer, we developed a scene in the story in which one of Barton's talented security specialists performs with his jazz ensemble. This leads to a discussion about how to manage real-time collaboration between highly skilled people, and gives readers the chance to consider new ways to think about how to manage IT innovation.

Work has fundamentally changed in a number of important ways from twentieth-century organizations to twenty-first-century organizations. "Place" and "time" of work are two of the most important changes, and we have incorporated these changes throughout the book. The "time" of work is no longer a specific time such as 9-to-5. As much of the factory work has been automated along with customer service, work is carried out throughout the day and night. And, of course, "place" of work has changed too—it has become less located in a specific physical place and is more often done in virtually connected spaces—often spaces that span the globe. In these conditions, the resulting impact has been that people are able to and need to draw on a richer set of experiences and bring them to bear on their work.

The example in Chapter 15 relates the work of John Cho, a highly talented systems architect, to the approaches that have been developed to achieve great levels of creativity by accomplished jazz musicians. It is not uncommon to find outstanding professionals engaging in outside activities that are complementary, that enable them to perform in their chosen professions better.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: Given the success we've had with the structure of this novel in classrooms and with readers so far, with the support of our talented Harvard Business Press team, we're extending the hybrid case-novel form to the journey of another hero: the twenty-first-century CEO. We pick up our hero, Jim Barton, at a latter point in his career, as he's offered the opportunity to lead the transformation of a struggling medium-sized military aircraft company into a successful twenty-first-century commercial airplane company. We are filling our hero's next journey with even more challenges, crises, seductions, dangers, and betrayals, and we're introducing a new kind of technological application that goes beyond Jim Barton's "white board" to help him navigate this strange new world, as he takes up his ultimate challenge: becoming a successful twenty-first-century CEO.

Excerpt from The Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O'Donnell:

Crisis

Thursday, June 28, 9:24 a.m. …

Barton was enjoying an unusually slow morning, finishing an elegant breakfast at a Hilton in midtown Manhattan, when the first call indicating trouble came in.

He had come to New York for an early afternoon meeting with Wall Street analysts. That [CEO Carl] Williams had chosen him for the meeting was a sign of just how well things had been going lately for IVK—and for Jim Barton, CIO. In the past three weeks, IVK's stock price had begun to rise, lifting spirits throughout the company. Optimism percolated through the offices and hallways. At the same time, Barton had been scoring victory after victory. A recent all-hands IT department meeting had gone extremely well; he'd fielded a few tough questions, but people seemed pleased with his answers and the department's overall direction. Even John Cho had nodded in response to some of Barton's remarks. His resolute actions had also gained him the confidence of the company's senior leadership. In meetings of that group, Barton's views now swayed Williams more readily than anyone else's. And why not? This was a guy who knew the IVK business inside and out and had apparently mastered the mysterious world of IT in just three months.

Sending Barton—former Loan Ops VP, now chief IT guy—to New York on the crest of a wave of recovery, Williams had explained, sent exactly the right message. Under a new CEO, IVK had woken up to a realization of its current size and the consequent need for a new style of management. The company would mature into a grownup financial services firm. What had been a freewheeling, improvisational approach to management would become more professional. Without sacrificing organizational agility, the company would institute more formal systems and controls. IT was, of course, key to achieving this. An expression Williams and Barton had begun to use in conversation to describe where they were headed captured their joint vision of the future: "a lean service factory." It was only natural that Barton would explain all this to Wall Street.

He'd been sipping coffee, going over his notes, making some last-minute adjustments to the presentation for the afternoon meeting, when his cell phone rang. The phone display told him it was Bernie Ruben. Barton guessed that the call might be last-minute advice about how to tweak the analyst presentation.

He was wrong.

"Hi Bernie, what's up?"

"Hi Jim. I'm afraid we've got a problem, and we felt we should get to you with an update."

"My laptop is upstairs. Is it something I need to change in the presentation?"

"Nothing like that. We're experiencing an outage this morning, for about the last forty minutes. Customer Service is down. None of the call center systems are working, and the Web site is locked up."

"Oh. Damn. I assume we're executing recovery procedures?"

"Such as they are."

This confused Barton. He'd heard, time and time again, about the call lists and emergency procedures that assured business continuity in a crisis. "What do you mean, 'Such as they are'?"

"Sorry. That's my cynicism coming through. The fact is, those procedures are pretty badly out of date. I don't think we realized quite how out of date until thirty minutes ago."

This made Barton angry. "Wish you'd flashed that cynicism a little sooner. I've been taking everyone's word on this. I thought we were prepared for an outage."

Ruben, hearing the tone of Barton's voice, pulled back. "We're not completely unprepared, just not as prepared as we'd like to be. We've got great people on it. But the truth is that outages don't usually happen in a predictable way. Inevitably, we have to wing it a bit."

"And why are you calling to tell me?" Ruben's area had no operational responsibilities, thus would be involved in an outage only peripherally. Barton imagined his team voting on who the bearer of bad news would be.

"Because everybody else is kind of busy, frankly," Ruben answered. "Fenton and Cho are right in the middle of this. Ripley is at the data center, rebooting things. Juvvani and his team are trying to figure out what's wrong with the Customer Service systems."

"Cho? Do we think this might be some kind of security event?"

"I was coming to that." Ruben paused, as if to steel himself, before continuing. It was very unlike Bernie, that pause, and it communicated the gravity of the circumstances more than the words that followed it. A bolt of panic stirred the eggs Benedict digesting in Barton's stomach.

"We're receiving a continuous flow of e-mails at our Customer Service address," continued Ruben, "about three per second, each with no text in the body of the message and a one word subject line that says, 'Gotcha.'"

"Gotcha?"

"Yes. It's like 'Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.'"

"What the hell does that mean?" Barton channeled his frustration into an exasperated hand movement, which promptly toppled his coffee cup. Hot liquid flowed from the table onto his lap.

"We don't know," said Ruben. "It could be a coincidence that Customer Service systems are down at the same time that we are receiving these e-mails, but …"

"But it doesn't sound coincidental, does it?" Barton stood, motioning to a waiter to indicate the spill and request his check.

"No," conceded Ruben. "That is the concern."

"Bernie, I need more information," Barton said. "I don't want to take people off their urgent duties, but at some point in the next hour or so I need a full update. Williams will get wind of this soon …"

"He has already …"

"… and I need to know what to tell him."

"I'll pull a group together, and we'll call you. How about 10:30?" Barton looked at his watch. It was 9:37 a.m. "Make it 10:15. There's no telling when Williams will call me. I'll hold off calling him until I hear more."

"I'm on it," said Ruben.

Barton hung up the phone. The waiter, rushing over to control the spill, also perceived the urgency of the call. He hurried the check to Barton, who quickly signed it and dashed out of the restaurant.

As Barton awaited the elevator that would take him to his floor, another call came in, this one from Graham Wells, IVK's VP of Legal Affairs and General Counsel.

"This is Jim Barton."

"Jim, we've got to reduce our legal exposure here." Wells's voice was an octave higher than usual.

"What do you mean, Graham?"

"We have to take dramatic action, signal that we've done everything we can."

"We are doing everything we can, Graham." […]

"Can we shut off power to the computer systems? Or cut the wires that go to the Internet?"

"We could, Graham, but I doubt that would be smart."

"Smart doesn't matter. What matters is what we can say in a deposition."

The elevator arrived, but Barton moved away from it to sit in a nearby chair.

"A deposition? What the hell are you talking about, Graham?"

"If it is security incident," he continued, "we may be looking at the legal implications. Customer lawsuits, shareholder lawsuits, government penalties, you name it."

"Because our Web site is down?" Barton said. But even as he said this, he knew it was more than that. His remaining optimism drained away, consumed in the heat of Wells's fear.

"If this is hackers—if hackers are stealing customer data—this is going to be bad."

"We don't know that yet, Graham."

"That's why we need to take drastic action. Listen, I just got off the phone with Carl. That last words he said to me were, "Call Barton, make sure he understands the legal ramifications.' That's what I'm trying to do. And my official legal opinion is that we should shut down every computer in the place until we know what's happening. Can we turn off power to the entire company? I will now call Carl back and let him know that you and I have spoken."

Barton was shaken. "Thanks, Graham," was all he could manage. An elevator arrived and Barton dashed across the lobby to catch it.

About the authors

Martha Lagace is the senior editor of HBS Working Knowledge.

Robert D. Austin is a professor at Copenhagen Business School and at Harvard Business School, where he chairs the executive education program for CIOs with cochair Richard Nolan.

Richard L. Nolan is professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and the Philip M. Condit Endowed Chair in Business Administration at the University of Washington.

Shannon O'Donnell is a consultant with Cutter Consortium's Innovation Practice and a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpt from The Adventures of an IT Leader by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan and Shannon O'Donnell. Copyright 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. Purchase this book

[link to original | source: HBS Working Knowledge | published: 12:00 AM PST | shared via feedly]

Leaders can tell stories to paint a vision or strategic direction, share a lesson, convey values or

illustrate desired behaviours. Stories also have an ability to forge deeper connections between

people, so inspiring them to focus their attention and take action. As Terrence Gargiulo said,

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

Stories work for leaders as a successful communication and engagement technique for several

reasons.

Firstly, stories convey emotion effectively, and emotion united with a strong idea is persuasive.

We remember what we feel. And our emotions inspire us to take action.

Secondly, stories are concrete and have the ability to transport us imaginatively to a place

where we can visualise the events being recounted.

Thirdly, stories are memorable: we are up to 22 times more likely to remember a story than a

set of disconnected facts (such as presentation dot-points).iii

Lastly, stories represent a pull strategy, unlike the push strategy used when we argue in a more

traditional way. Stories engage the listener, pulling them into the story to participate in the

conversation, rather than telling them what to think.

View the full story here

One of my least favorite activities of all time is the icebreaker. You know how it goes: Throw together a bunch of people--six, eight, more than two is too many--and force them to tell each other something silly, secret, anything that will publicly humiliate in front of total strangers. Cue nervous laughter and clammy palms. But barely has the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship begun and Ideo is already telling us: We have a better way. We're going to use design.

The Ideo icebreaker is a pilot project that it's testing at Skoll--a quick-fire exercise "to meet each other and design some new partnerships." First task: "Turn around and pick a partner you haven't met before." (I get Raymond from Hong Kong.) Next, we enter the "empathy stage." (How far before we get to denial?) "Do a miniature interview. Take five minutes to get to know your partner. Don't write at this point. Just listen. After two-and-a-half minutes, I'll give you a signal. AND NO WRITING YET."

I tell Raymond about Fast Company, and Raymond tells me about Baptist Oi Kwan Social Services, which runs, among other things, a vocational rehab program that helps the mentally ill find gainful employment, many of them in a restaurant that the organization operates in Hong Kong. (When I ask what kind of food, Raymond looks at me--an obviously Chinese person--as if I am crazy. "Chinese!" he says. "It's good!")

Next, it's time for the "distill stage." We have two minutes to write down each other's names, organizations, and three defining features of our organizations.

Finally, we're given four minutes for the "prototyping stage." That means coming up with a project that the two organizations can do together in a week, and then another that we can do in a year. At the rate we're talking, it will take a week just to come up with a project that we can do in a week, but we gamely devise a plan to help Raymond's organization improve its publicity and outreach while giving Fast Company access to an interesting case study of a social enterprise. When it's time to come up with a project for a year, well, we just extend the weekly project because they need the staff and I'd rather have a more in-depth story.

In the end, it was a little like speed dating. There was the rare winner: One person effusively announced that she had forged a partnership that might actually work outside the walls of this bland conference room. But more of what I heard was this: "That was odd." "For God's sake, I can't hear a thing." "Why can't you just let us talk?" "That was awkward."

In other words, it's still an icebreaker.

Source: Fast Company