Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Delegate to Decrease Occupational Spam

In response to my article in Forbes on Email Hell, my friend Richard Titus made a spot on comment:

This is great. I also employ several email tools (ClearContext, x1) to try and reduce the "occupational spam" that's a critical part of the BBC culture. A big part of the problem, however, is a failure to delegate decisions & authority. Over Cc'ing i find is really about people seeking permission rather than forgiveness - as an executive you have to give people a goal, and permission to succeed or fail in its pursuit.

This isn't just germane to the BBC culture, the BCC culture exists in most organizations.  Email and meeting habits are set from the top down.

The difference between communication and collaboration is having a bounded goal.  Executives have a responsibility not only for goal setting (which with motivation is leadership) and accountability (management).  But we have responsibility to structure conversations towards goals.  Richard points out CCing is symptom of a lack of empowering responsibility, but there is also an opportunity. 

Reporting can flow in more ways than up.  Reporting doesn't need to be a side-activity, but a byproduct of getting work done.  It needs a modicum of structure and additional transparency that is now easy with social software.

Do not interpret this as  decouple decision rights and information flow.  The spice must flow, however, the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.  My apologies to Frank Herbert & Karl Marx for that last comment.

Meeting Hell

Meetings are a big productivity killer that you can control by working together better.  Studies have shown the cost of meetings, you probably spend a week per month in meetings, and you can calculate your own cost of meetings. The issue isn't just where you spend your team's time, but how you spend it. Vinnie Mirchandani, following my post in Forbes on Email Hell, points out the productivity problem isn't just email.

The other big productivity killer in corporations is meetings. I am constantly surprised to see too many of my client employees just go from meeting to meeting - then, of course come back to their desks to handle the deluge of email!

Like email, improving meeting productivity requires more than personal tactics.  Through leadership, the behavior of the group must change.  This distinction is critical in our current climate.  Companies need to make do with less -- and doing so cannot be done through personal productivity gains -- but with efficient and effective coordination and collaboration of teams, the organization as a whole, and how partners and customers intersect.

Changing meetings is difficult because nowhere does company culture manifest itself, if not define itself, than through meetings.  The meeting culture of some companies puts a premium on presentation, or cooperation to consensus, or conflict as creativity.  Research has even shown that most meetings are status contests.  Beyond this theater as a disclaimer, here is some practical advice to make meetings more effective and efficient:

Do I need to be there?

Without a criteria for who should attend meetings, the attendee list tends to grow.  Not only does having more people in the meeting effect the productivity of the meeting, but it keeps people from working on other things.  Put responsibility for this criteria upon the person calling the meeting, as they have the greatest odds of abusing it.

Share notes

At the beginning of every meeting, ensure that someone is taking notes and how they will be shared.  Better yet, have an established practice for how this is done in every meeting.  Sharing notes can help decrease the attendee list for efficiency sake.  How notes are taken can make the group more effective:

• Consider having the note taker project while taking notes.  This clarifies and gains support for what was said and what is agreed to. 
• Take notes in a wiki to make it easy to link to supporting materials, pass editing control to others, share while taking and makes the notes searchable and discoverable alongside other knowledge.
• Don't aim for meeting minutes, encourage summarization, but try to capture as much as possible.  The great thing about meeting notes is that they carry with them the context of an event.  Small things said may mean a lot in the future. For example, someone might contribute an alternative point of view that wasn't part of what might be the summary, but when someone finds it outside the meeting they can contact the person to further explore it.
• Focus on next steps.  Conclude meetings with agreement on what was learned and the action items.

One tendency I have seen is to constrict note sharing for sake of politics.  Sometimes this necessary, but the instinct for control tends to hamper productivity.  For example, if division heads need to meet on an HR issue and craft a message for broader consumption, sometimes the meeting owner controls the notes.  Always share notes with meeting attendees and have a protocol for how they will be shared further.

What's the goal?

A meeting without a clear goal shouldn't exist.  Goals help focus conversation, but also ensure time is being spent towards the right outcome.

The most unproductive outcome of a meeting is having another meeting.  Usually because of unclear goal setting.  Unfortunately, meetings are autopoietic, meaning they self-propagate.  The only time a meeting should lead to another meeting is if that is the up front goal (let's plan the annual sales kickoff, or let's divide the strategic planning we need to accomplish into these three meetings).

What's the agenda?

The structure of an agenda should support accomplish the goal of the meeting.  One challenge is trying to limit agenda items while everyone has their own agendas and need to be heared.  One of the quickest produtivity gains available is to perform agenda setting in a wiki beforehand.  Be sure you bring people's attention to the agenda as it changes.  Link to supporting materials so everyone arrives at the meeting not only understanding the goal, but understands the subject matter behind each agenda item.

Will this ever end?

Always have a firm start time and end time for meetings.  Notice that when meetings have a firm end time, and you get close to it, suddenly the meeting becomes more productive?  Consider how time as a constraint can provide focus for conversation.  Consider trying that hour long meeting in 30 minutes.

Identify Subgroups

Before a meeting, consider if a subgroup of attendees can better discuss and decide or recommend a course of action.  During a meeting recognize when the conversation really is for a subset of attendees, and if time allows, table the conversation until the subgroup can work it out.

Standup Meetings

One of the best practices businessfolk can adapt from agile software development methodologies is the standup meeting.  Have the team meet daily for 5-15 minutes to synch on status.  Sometimes this is done litterally standing up, which gives even the most diligent of soldiers a stake in ending the meeting before they pass out.  Each team member takes a turn updating everyone, perhaps taking clarifying questions, but not using the forum for protracted discussion.

Prep Time

The beauty of the standup meeting is that everyone comes prepared to update others.  However, this preparation doesn't come for free.  You need to allow the team members time to prepare for the meeting. 

One evolution I've witnessed at Socialtext is how they increasingly shared their status updates in the wiki before the standup meeting, and then it became convention for everyone to read the updates before the meeting.  In any meeting format, status updates are better replaced with coordinating conversations, unblocking issues and gaining a shared understanding of priorities.

BAHM: Big Hairy Audacious Meetings

So far, I've provided general considerations for making meetings more productive for groups. But what are some bold things you can try with your team? For the more adventurous teams, here are some Big Hair Audacious Meeting methods to consider:

• Barcamp Your Retreat -- At Socialtext, half of our employees are remote, so our face to face meetings really matter when we have them.  Initially we did like all companies do, lots of time preparing the perfect agenda, with lots to cover.  Once we tried a Barcamp-style open space methodology for the first afternoon.  People liked it so much, we threw away the structured agenda for the week and let it self-organize.  At the end of the week, everyone revelled in the experience, but we also reviewed the original agenda and found we covered every single item.
• Turn it Off or Turn it On -- Companies have gone to the extreme in adapting to having connectivity available during meetings.  Some have banned laptops and blackberries during meetings, which I think completely misses the point.  Doing email in meetings is bad, but the cause is usually a culture of unproductive email and meetings.  Having laptops augment meetings, with wikis, backchannels and the ability to search, is good with the right focus.  But you need to make people conscious of the issue.  Try three things:
  • During specific portions of a meeting, or certain kinds of meetings, the organizer needs to demand all laptops shut for 100% focus on the people in the room.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ask people to bring their laptops and look to augment the meeting with social software and search. Afterwards, ask people how this made your team more productive, or not.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ban everything but pen, paper and people.  Afterwards, ask people how it helped or hurt productivity -- but more importantly talk about if time and effectiveness is being lost because people are not valuing attention.
• Standups -- I used standup meetings as an illustration of how time is best use for status reporting, but do try this format with your team.
• Make Every Meeting a Party -- I always quote Pete Kaminski's insight that "time spent face to face is too valuable for work" to make the point that teams need to socialize.  If you don't afford the time to help your team be unproductive, they will make meetings unproductive.
• Turn Recurring Meetings into Processes -- survey the meeting topics of your organization and you may find recurring meetings that are the result of broken business processes.  Fix the process or lackthereof.
• Get Back to One-on-Ones -- short one-to-one meetings can be incredibly productive.  They even help decrease email volume.  Consider the patterns with your team, and if you can carve out the time for one-on-one meetings by having less group meetings.
• No Meeting Monday -- this is the obvious audacious one.  Consider banning meetings on Monday, not just because it is a good day for people to collect themselves and orient how meetings should be conducted for the rest of the week.  But it will raise the conciousness of meeting cost.  As with email, knowing it is an issue we are all responsible for is half the battle.

In summary, I don't take the extreme position that meetings are wholly unproductive, and the issue isn't the cost of meetings, but how to increase their return by working together better.  In future posts I hope to address how to make meetings more effective and efficient with partners and customers.

Related readings:

• Best Buy's Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)
• Tim Ferriss' Do-Not-Do-List
• 37signals' Meetings are Toxic
• Short case study on meeting augmentation
• Outsourcing memory
• 43 folders on Topless meetings
• Productivity of Far Flung Teams
• The hidden cost of meetings

Leadership and Management of Distributed Collaboration, and the Rise and Fall of the Chief Community Officer

Last week I was on a panel at Office 2.0 discussing "who owns community?"  Organizational Development was just one topic we explored, and ZDnet has a brief video excerpt.  In this post, let me clarify my comments.

Leadership in Distributed Organizations

My CEO Eugene Lee was recently an executive at Adobe and Cisco.  The transition over the past year wasn't just from Bigco to Startup.  Half of Socialtext's employees are distributed across four continents.  Eugene recently observed that "in a distributed organization, leadership matters more than management."

This isn't just about motivating distributed teams.  Distributed teams have higher coordination costs without a clear direction.  This is similar to Eugene Kim's point that "there is no such thing as collaboration without a goal."  An extreme example is viewing Wikipedia as distributed mass collaboration, where the clear mission of what to create and why not only attracts volunteers, but reduces the costs of coordinating them to the point where a phantom authority can work. 

At the scale of a distributed startup, leadership amounts to establishing a focus.  If you attempt to manage at the task level instead of providing a framework for team members to decide if something is within or without the focus of the team, the team isn't moving fast enough.  Management does provide the process discipline and measurements to sustainably keep the smaller decisions in check with focus, but it underperforms in abscence of leadership.  And there is another word for too much management, overhead.

When everyone works in one place, "management by walking around" comes at the cheap.  Walking around four continents is not. As our distributed collaboration tools get better at sharing social context as a byproduct of being productive, new management practices unfold.  I think we are just beginning to discover the practices for managing networked organizations, and one of them is the emphasis of leadership.

Who Should "Own" Community?

On the panel I answered with the always correct answer that "it depends."  But also suggested that ownership of community will trend in two directions.  Social Software has made community a strategic imperative for many organizations.  Recalling when risk management became a strategic imperative in some industries about ten years ago, you saw the rise of the Chief Risk Officer.  While the emergence of a new CxO function is fleeting at best, I was provocative to make a point that we could see the rise of the Chief Community Officer to align and coordinate internal and external communities.

Charlene Li twittered this, prompting a twitterstorm.

But there is a more likely scenario -- where community becomes a function of process ownership.  I don't beleive it will be left to specialist Community Managers who report into Marketing.  Community will become a facet of everyone's job.  Not just external communities for customers and partners and media and investors and developers and more.  Every process in the enterprise has the potential to be redesigned with more transparency and participation through Social Software.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, Process owners will lead communities.  They have the domain expertise within and around the process to drive conversation and collaboration around aligned goals.  However, it will take time to acquire community skills and for the organization to transition. 

360 Degree Process Communities

Let me illustrate this scenario.  Today ownership in corporations of customer communities commonly resides in marketing. This makes sense when you consider "Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view" (Peter Drucker twittered via Tim O'Reilly & John Battelle).  But marketing doesn't own all the more specialized processes that create this view, so Marketing Managers become traffic cops and attempt to interface the whole organization.  Customer communities are more sterile, homogenized and veneer than they will be in the future.  When people seeking support, sales, partner, developer and media conversations intersect primarily with one part of the organization that has its own goals and measurements -- you have an elephant trying to fit through a keyhole and nobody knows who has the key.

Before issuing a call for a COO, consider this evolution.  Support often is the next group to take ownership of its community.  Sometimes there is organizational alignment behind it (the VP of Support also owns Product Quality, or dotted lines with Marketing).  With this more specialized ownership, the VP of Support then manages two communities and possibly a third.  Contact Center employees and customers seeking after-market product support, and potentially tapping across the entire organization to help resolve exceptions. 

This is a 360 degree view of community around a set of processes.  Consider the same for Marketing.  More specialized ownership would have them transition MarCom processes into driving the conversations around those communications.  But also increased focus on internal communities, beginning with their most important customers, sales (we just concludes a webinar series on collaboration between marketing and sales, available for download).  In today's market, where 50% of consumers trust the voice of the rank and file employee over the CEO, the more active Marketing is in internal communities, the more successful external communities become.

Initially, 360 Degree Process Communities will be formed by front office such as marketing, sales, business development, professional services and support.  HR has already begun this evolution within the back office.  And while you may discount it at first thought, don't rule out process communities in back office functions like finance where you least expect it.

Process to Practice

Mike Gotta once made an important distinction clear for me.  That Process is "how work should be done."  And Practice is "how work is actually done."  When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things.  When process doesn't exist, practice fills the void.  While people don't realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community -- an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done.  The problem is that we haven't had the tools to support good practice.  The problem is that we haven't developed the group memory around practice that creates institutional leverage.   In fact, we still design organizations to prevent practice and cultures that hoard knowledge and communities.  With all the focus on Process Execution, its time to instill at least awareness of Practice Execution.

Who is on my team, anyway?

Larry Irons digs ups some old research to show that distributed collaboration isn't just about getting your team on the same page.  But figuring out who the team is in the first place.

Those advocating Enterprise 2.0, especially wikis, may consider the benefits described back in 2002 by Mortensen and Hinds obvious. However, I’d be surprised if managers in global organizations using cross-functional teams would agree that, on average, only 75% of the employees on any given distrbuted team agree about who is, and who is not, on their team. The implications for collaboration are significant. At the same time that wiki applications such as Socialtext People provide increased awareness of the boundaries of a team, they also increase the likelihood of finding people outside the team with expertise relevant to team challenges, resulting in more boundary spanning across teams. Overall, information sharing within teams and across teams increases.

Sounds like the making of a great Dilbert cartoon, outside the cubicles. 

But this distributed problem is widely distributed.  85% of knowledge workers engage in distributed collaboration.  That's a lot of nebulous teams.

Service and the Fifty Percent Rule

Next time you go into an Apple store, notice that 50% of the space is for retail sales and 50% for service and support.  I overheard this weekend that it is the most profitable arrangement in the history of retail. 

True or not, it is curiously obvious that complex products not only need after-market support, but giving it equal treatment increases profit through customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Plus all the cross sales when you have to walk through the retail space or wait a bit.

By contrast, you have to walk through a cramped support department to get to things at Fry's.  After some extreme frustration there I shifted my technolust procurement to Best Buy.  Their service department is clean, well lit and all, and they do have that Geek Squad specialization.  But recently I attempted to have my six month old PS3 serviced there, but apparently they will do absolutely nothing for in-warranty products unless you buy some kind of extra insurance at the time of purchase.  Absolutely nothing.  So I had to call Sony and go through a ship and repair process.

This is in contrast to when my wife's camera broke under warranty and Keeble & Schuchat sent it to Canon and called us when it came back to the store for pickup. Simple enough, and I bought a tripod while there.

What Best Buy is missing is the fact that they provide no after market value add with their retail -- in comparison to buying and servicing with an e-commerce vendor.  If I buy something in person I expect a person to be able to help me when things go wrong.  At least during the manufactures warranty, and I might pay to extend that period with the retailer.

But I think Apple gets something more than the value of customer experience.  According to the Consortium of Service Innovation, there is an iceberg effect for product knowledge.  90% of conversations about supporting products never touch the company.  Only 10% touch the call center.  And 1% of this service and product quality knowledge are assimilated. 

Sometimes this distribution is purposeful.  Support is viewed as a cost center.  Time to resolution (which we've decreased by as much as 30%) often trumps customer satisfaction or capturing knowledge.  Worst practices are often employed to incent contact center reps to avoid contact.

The problem is far worse with multi-vendor support.  Multi-vendor issues take 3-4 times longer to resolve.  So almost all vendors explicitly do not support these issues at all.  There is some promise in Vendor Relationship Management, or communities that address systemic needs through the demand side supplying itself, but only the beginning of promise.

So I wonder if Apple's vertical integration strategy is what makes this possible.  Is the 50% rule only a rule if you tackle the multi-vendor support problem?  Alignment or integration between Marketing and Support plays a role and some organizations put the same person in charge of Product Quality and Support.  But this opportunity space inherently requires rethinking not just organizational boundaries, but the firm itself.

For your business online, what porportion is dedicated to retail vs. support?  When not constricted by the boundaries of physical space, and can be empowered through community, where do you draw that line?  What crosses that line is a process not unlike osmosis, where energy is released with the right balance.

UPDATE: article in the Boston Globe on listening and participating to online conversations about service and support

Provocations and Design Flaws for Management

Andrew McAfee shares a provocation and a design flaw about the future of management.  His provocation is how on the one hand management can impose new structures through IT, and on the other management can let them emerge.  He also shares some provocations by others:

• Tim Brown, IDEO: Creative people aren’t interested in management.
• Hal Varian, Google: ‘Statistician’ is the sexy job of the 21st century.
• Henry Mitzberg, McGill: We are not living in time of great change. Companies will not save the world.
• Eric Abrahamson, Columbia:  Organizations are over-organized.
• Yves Doz, INSEAD: The danger is to think that what’s new is exciting and good, while what’s old is bad and tired.
• Keith Sawyer, Washington University: People are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.
• James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: The centralization of decision-making is a conceptual error. Individuals are not better than the collective.
• Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford: The language of economics is toxic to the practice of management.
• Kevin Kelly, Wired: Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.

That last one, by KK, had me laughing and thinking for five minutes.

If I had to add my own, it wouldn't simply declare the end of process, as Gary Hamel is one who brought together this group (although we have talked about it before).  Lately I've been thinking about whether Agile software development is really a process and what it could imply for business process in the future.  I owe you a post about this, but to put it in the form of a provocation: business processes at the edge of the organization will emphasize social discovery, group forming and transparent communication over process itself.

In the meantime, go see Andy's impediment or design flaw, People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations and the remedy: Create an Emergent, Social Enterprise Information Environment.

Decoupling Decision Rights and Decentralization

Andrew McAfee has an interesting post that challenges the trend of decentralization in organizations.  Noting Tom Malone's work on how decreased communication costs enable more decentralized decision rights, he makes a distinction between information and knowledge.  You can now provide information to any potential decision maker at a low cost, but the best tacit knowledge for a given decision may reside in someone the core of an organization instead of the assumed edge.

Let’s say that a mortgage company realized that a few of its loan officers were just better at assessing credit risk than all the others. For whatever reasons (intelligence, experience, intuition, etc. ), they just had superior specific knowledge. In that situation, it would make good sense not to decentralize, but instead to centralize that decision right within the company, taking it away from the other loan officers. All the general knowledge (income statements, credit histories, etc.) would be sent to these few people, who would apply their specific knowledge to it and made decisions. In this example low information costs are still important; they allow all the general knowledge to be zipped to the few good officers. But the effect of low information costs isn’t decentralization and greater empowerment. Instead, it’s centralization of an important decision right and reduced autonomy for most loan officers.

Thought experiments like this one indicate to me that the net result of disappearing information costs won’t necessarily be decentralization. It will instead be the decoupling of information flows and decision rights. Organization designers will be able to allocate decision rights without worrying about how costly it will be to get required information to deciders. Leaders will be able to ask "Who should make this decision?" without adding "Keeping in mind that it’s going to be slow, difficult, and expensive to get them the general knowledge they’ll need."

Will this work always, or even usually, lead to more decentralized organizations? I find myself less confident than Malone that this will be the case. I agree with him that we’re at a very interesting point in the history of technology and the economics of information, but I’d label it a great decoupling (of information flow and decision rights) rather than a broad decentralization (as decision rights lateralize along with information flows).

Information has no value until it informs a decision that results in an outcome.  This is part of why it wants to be free and increasingly is.  The decider certainly plays a role in this equation.  But something concerns me about this Carr-esque classification of decision making capabilities based on tacit knowlege (what is it about theories from Harvard on expertise ;-P).  And I don't think it is enough to buck the trend of decentralization.

Decreasing communication costs and ubiquitous information begets transparency.  While the future impact of IT provides both the directions of strong crypto and transparent society, with uncharted privacy implications and policy -- I believe transparency is a greater force.  Especially when it comes to revealing bad decisions.

Lets take Andrew's mortgage company example.  First, celebrate that the organization can change structure from the decoupling of information and decision rights.  Then, note it can shift back.  If a group gains centralized decision making capabilities because of their, augmented by "general" information, it is in a good position to execute the decision making process. 

But my read of Malone's book is it is not just about decreasing communications costs that enable decentralization, but how decentralized organizations can scale.  I believe Andrew is suggesting that information systems that automate information processing enables this group to scale its capabilities.  At first glance, this is similar to how trading desks work.  But approving a mortgage for an individual is very different from institutional trading.  Markets are social and the actors in institutional trading actually rely on relationships, and by doing so improve their tacit knowledge and handle exceptions better.  By taking the social interaction out of the hands of the mortgage officer who is closer to the actual customer and in a position to assess different kinds of risks beyond the FICO score.  And perhaps worse in the long term, it dehumanizes the organization's capability to develop a relationship with the customer.

Perhaps I am being too prescriptive with the business model, and maybe sidestepped the issue by hypothesizing there is a different kind of tacit knowledge at the periphery of the organization.   But the point is some kinds of tacit knowledge and decision making capability, those best at detecting and handling exceptions to business processes, may not be scalable through automation and centralization.

What I really like about Andrew's idea is the ability to reassign decision rights because they are decoupled from information.  Good thing too, because corporations don't have deciding who is best to decide down to a science.  Given the potential transparency in an organization, we may get better at more broadly handling exceptions and learning from decisions made.  We may actually discover who influences makes decisions. But my long term belief in decentralized organization recognizes that it is the environment the organization exists within, not that inside the organization, that creates the greatest amount of exceptions.  And the organizations that put decision rights closer to exceptions are more likely to adapt and survive.

Perhaps a better structure is to encourage decoupling of decision rights

What's your morning routine?

I'll roll out of bed around 6:30 and sit in the lawnchair in the backyard with coffee and laptop.  I try to go with any waking thought I have, maybe note it in a wiki.  Take a quick glance at the calendar.  Then a shot of Techmeme and ego feeds in Newsgator.  Skim unread Gmail and then I'm done scanning.  More coffee.  Turn on IRC, so I'm effectively in the office.  I'll try to dive deep into something before the kids wake up, maybe a blog post like this, start my daily internal blog post or plow through email.  Sometimes it is a call with Europe.  What I write may go unfinished before I take my daughter to school.  Then I have a good half hour at the office before it starts buzzing.

Not that it is terribly effective, but I've never been much of a morning person and that's my routine.  Jim Citrin surveyed 20 CEOs and executives from F500 companies with the same question, and got how they tap the power of their morning routine.  Go read the details, but the tips are:

• Start early
• Get a jump on email
• Exercise every morning
• Be thoughtful about the source, form and timing of your news
• Problem solve
• Make family time
• Be creative with your morning routine

Now the cult of the CEO isn't the best source for tips, but they are good stories about habits of effective and busy people.

What's your morning routine?

The Wikinomics Playbook

UPDATE: An interesting related project by Penguin Books is A Million Penguins, letting anyone edit a book to be published.  The wiki is down at the moment, but PaidContent notes it began with “It had snowed, and was now raining. Gritty slush covered the pavement. Sharp crystals of snow decorated grass.”  Reuters notes the challenge is finding “believable fictional voice” within the mass collaboration.  This was a big challenge for group editing of the Wired Wiki story.

The last chapter of Don Tapscott's new book, Wikinomics, invites readers to write it: “Join us in peer producing the definitive guide to the twenty-first-century corporation on www.wikinomics.com.”  Today we launched a Socialtext wiki for the Wikinomics Playbook, where people can not only learn about the power of mass collaboration, but participate in it.  The book is already one of the fastest selling business titles and is an excellent primer on how models of collaboration are unfolding from open source to blogging to wikis in the enterprise to enable people to participate in the economy like never before.

The second to last chapter is about enterprise wikis.  Half of it discusses how Best Buy is using a wiki knowledge-base for the Geek Squad.  The other half is an interview with yours truly and shares some of Socialtext's success stories. The first chapter is available online as a pdf.

 

This is a great example of how a book can be augmented with a wiki, as most books are out of date by the time they are published, never quite finished and have the potential for participation. Last month we helped Larry Lessig share the entire Code 2.0 book in a wiki.  I expect that soon such commons-peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common.

Jeff Nolan Leaves SAP

Jeff Nolan has moved on from SAP.  He has really served as a model to follow for others working in a large company that hope to move it forward.  I'm sure he rustled some feathers along the way, but it was Jeff that brough SAP into the blogosophere and woke the giant from within.  As a friend and colleague I know he will be great in his new gig.