As an Ambassador of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris on February 7-8,2012, I am scooping (reading-selecting-sharing) lot of posts about the so called "social business" or "Enterprise 2.0". 

Most of these readings are exhorting "management 1.0" to become more "2.0 oriented", which consists mainly to move from hierarchy management to network management. You take a department in a company, you engage people in this department to work with new social technology, arguing that sharing knowledge is pushing productivity and work done! Companies are still working with the same processes for one century and they just add technologies or separated platforms of networking. Is this changing the way enterprise are profitable? Is this "social business"? 

Social business is about re-thinking the processes in all parts of the enterprise on a bottom-up conversation base. As a wiki expert I am frustrated to see companies relegating wiki as a management project tool. What if a wiki will manage the finance department or the human ressources or the customers relationships. This is not a fantasy, it is just possible and desirable. Why? 

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• Collaborative Consumption: How it will disrupt "traditional" Business Models (customerthink.com)

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• Meeting points like Twitter or Facebook catch more attention than TV programms 
• Social media connect people locally ensuring new meetings in vivo and amazing community feeling 
• Personal issue are solved by real person directly connected through Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin or Quora (asynchronous reply is better than no reply at all)
• If you go for shopping, you trust more recommandations from your buddies' internet community than the shops or brands reviews. 
• You can follow the conversation or let it but you know where to find conversations. 
• The spiral of silence is brocken. Everybody can add his word, his pictures, his videos "silently" or "loudly" hoping to find his soul mate in a little comment or re-tweet coming from nowhere. For a human being a little comment is a BIG reward. 

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35 years working with personal computer and what has be done to rethink the way we live with this appendice of our brain?

How have you arranged your table to keep your hands, your shoulders, your back, your neck, your eyes (I will not add your legs but think about them too) in a relax, confortable position during all day long?

This is my husband's new solution. He is really happy with his "flat desktop", so I share it with you. Please tell me YOUR home made solution!

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Back from Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt (Germany),  Thanks to Bjorn Negelmann and Cathrin Gill for this opportunity.

1. The format of the summit was a real good surprise: 10 minutes pitch followed by discussions, open-space workshop, networking space during the day and after dinner of day one. Great opportunity to meet and discuss with companies' evangelist and consultants. I was happy enough to talk with @sagenet (Jenny), @elsua (Luis), @frogpond (Martin), @aponcier (Antony), Joachim Linder from http://komblog.de, Wendelin Auer from http://www.kkundk.de/, Felix Schröder and his CEO from http://justsofwareag.com, Juliet from Bausch, @JeanYves, @andgenth, Juliette Girard from Renault, Richard Collin, Rolf Schmidt-Holz...All embracing persons, very enthusiatics about the summit and the subject, Enterprise 2.0, but very realistic too. Companies with a long lasting internal communication are even working hard to turn upside down their habits. They are still looking for transversal, fluent, agile conversations all over the company (nobody talked about connecting companies communities with customers or providers).

2. As an entrepreneur I know that business is just about customers. Processes inside the company are aimed to deliver the product or service customers are waiting for. According to cases studied during the summit, big companies (Renault, BASF, T-System, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, IBM, Bayer) are experimenting social platforms, community buildings behind their "firewall". 

starting from the inside (internal initiatives aimed at employees) to gain proficiency in order to move to the outside (externally connecting and engaging in communities with customers and other partners) seems to be the norm. (source:http://artlifework.wordpress.com/) 

What these companies are fearing? Is the "firewall" protecting them 100% from critics, leaking, legal issues? Where are their best allied: inside the company or outside? They are doing a great job, their products are fantastic, so they can meet the "public" with confidence, nothing to hide. Do they know that the most creative and profitable industry sector, fashion, is NOT protected with copyright. (see: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.... ). Remember what Rolf Schmidt-Holz pointed out opening the summit, about people inside companies : "...You find out that you have fantastic people, mostly not at level one....Excellent people need to be treated excellently and it means giving them space, freedom". He was speaking by hart, from his experience on the ground.

3. One workshop was dedicated to "Network analysis". Information, knowledge, pull/push information, network design, bottom-up, ...companies as Lee Bryant showed up are delighted with designing processes aimed to put limits to employees' responsabilities. 

But what if the network is a rhizome, each employee a knot (maybe a crux) and the flow between two knots completely free? Forget about tree and graph, listen the noise, see what "knots" are growing, what piece of information become re-used and is integrated as a knowledge...[1]

Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon like many others current movements (open gouvernement, open foodies, commons...) are disruptive in essence. Are we on the verge to embrace "The perfect society" as described by Socrates?: 

"...The perfect society relies on laborers, slaves and tradesmen. The guardian class is to protect the city. The question is put to Socrates, "Who will guard the guardians?" or, "Who will protect us against the protectors?" Plato's answer to this is that they will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a "noble lie". The noble lie will assure them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege; they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it." (source:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F)

[1] A simple wiki is able to give all these informations: 
- listen the noise with "Recent Changes", "watchlist", "New Pages" delivered by email or RSS
- see what knots are growing with Users tracking on each collaborative article
- see what information becomes a knowledge thanks to "search" or "semantic tools"
You can also plug-in all "apps" (like IPhone apps) to test whatever type of collaboration or integration (ex: mobile inputs, twitter or facebook integration). This is agile, versatile and low cost.

* great post which sum-up the Summit with quotes:
http://artlifework.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/lessons-learned-at-the-enterprise-2-0-summit/

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via flickr.com

Any comments?

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Bjoern Negelmann (Conference Chair for Kongress Media) offered me this interview I publish below while he is preparing the next Enterprise2.0 Summit planned in Frankfurt (Germany) October 26.-28.,2010. I was invited by Kongress Media to be one of their Ambassadors and I accepted right away as entrepreneur, "noosphere" enthusiast and wiki evangelist. I will add short comments to Bjoern's responses (I'm afraid I would have be a very bad ambassador ;-) )

Q1 The Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 is focused on "Setting the path to an open and agile enterprise". Lot of buzz about enterprise and openness, but after more than one century of secret process, patent, industrial spying, in 2010 what the enterprises could gained by openness? 

Briefly - openness supports a more holistic understanding of the enterprise to internal and external stakeholders. With everybody microblogging about their work efforts internally, documenting and sharing the results of their project efforts in wikis and interconnecting with different peers in the internal and external realm - the value generation of the enterprise becomes more transparent for those who are allowed to view it. If there are any potentials of improvement anybody can get involved and give his or her input and suggestions. This allows not planned and executed solution finding and generation beyond political and organizational boundaries. So again - openness leads to speeding up time-to-market and improve the flexibility and agility the enterprise acts on the market! 

''

My point of view: JP Rangaswami wrote:"For information to have power, it needs to be held asymmetrically. Preferably very very asymmetrically. Someone who knows something that others do not know can do something potentially useful and profitable with that information." This time is over: information can no more be held asymmetrically because of the Internet. Value will no more be generated by "scarcity" but only by "conversation". 

Q2 What is the concept of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in Frankfurt? As I could see from the webpage there are 3 days of program with a lot of international guests and a bunch of corporate people speaking about their project. 

Yes - indeed I think the most differentiating point of the E2.0 SUMMIT in Frankfurt is the number of corporate representatives on the speaker's list. The E20 SUMMIT is not the conference about the E20 visions - not at all. It's about the practical insights of the first movers and the solutions towards the challenges of E20 projects. These two aspects are forming the two tracks of our two day conference. Then again each track is divided into different sessions with short talks and a lot of discussions. Additionally there are three keynote sessions on strategic questions as e.g. "what are the characteristics of the manager 2.0?" and an open space workshop where the participants are getting involved to talk and discuss their detailed questions. Optional the E20 SUMMIT provides two pre-conference workshops about "social messaging" and the "social networking culture". 

Q3 What will be your most favourite session of the upcoming event? 

This is hard to decide but spontaneously I would say that's the session on the question of how to overcome the cultural boundaries in E20 projects. This is a session we already did last year but it is so relevant that we have to talk about this year again. Behind this session there is the discussion about E20 projects in international companies. As the E20 projects in larger corporation within any European country is always also an project within an international setting - this is very relevant and also distinguishing from discussion in the pure Anglo-Saxon context - with everybody have the same mother tongue and nearly the same cultural values. 

''

My point of view: International Enterprises headed in European Countries are very lucky to experience the european "melting pot" every day. They are trained to pay attention to conversations over the borders...

Q4 During the preparation of the E20 Summit did you notice any new tendencies compared to your work for the previous E20 Summit? 

Well - yes - the E20 idea is more widely spread. There are good practices from first movers - mainly with E20 initiatives focussing on some specific use scenaries as "improving the general information flow by micro-blogging" or "making the corporate knowledge more transparent by documenting projects into wikis". With this the discussions about the challenges of E20 projects become more specific - we are not anymore discussing about the challenges of "adoption" but about the challenges of "rewarding systems", "community management" and new "leadership models". 

Q5 About speakers, what is from your point of view, the main differences between European and US speakers?(what about Asia speakers)? 

That's a great question. Honestly said we haven't had any Asian speaker and always only a few US speakers as we are mainly focussing the practical insights of the intra-European context. But comparing the Europeans and the Americans it would say the main difference is in the "point of view" of the subject. Though it might not be representative as we always invited only US speakers for overview talks but in discussions with them and other US experts in the E20 field I would say they stick very much towards the high-level E20 discussion. They tend to argue very much on the big cultural changes and less on the specific, hands-on details. Especially the German corporates they want to know the specific details of how to set up the community management or the leadership model first - before turning the "big" wheel of the changement of the corporate cultural. At the end for a successful project you need both - but the approaches are different. 

''

My point of view: for me the most interesting part of the e20Summit. I used to imagine US managers as "solution-makers", always with a check-list in hand. But you are right I forget their "pioneer spirit", their preference to change the world (in a pragmatic way, far from the french way...)

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European Union governments are suspended to Greek Prime Minister's economic plan to save its country from bankruptcy. But what about the public finance states of the rest of the European Union?

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Social Platforms are claimed to be customers' loudspeakers and in a legal way they are a stage for people to create, talk, discuss, relaying Poster "boys" underground game.

What do you think about Poster Boy Movement?

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via fsteurope.com

Apart of the flagrant desiquilibrium existing in the Europe Union, between the top contributing countries and the remaining countries, apart of the constantely growing european bureaucraty contrasting with stagnant democraty, I think urgent to try to understand why Euro currency is so high against the USD despite low interest rate and deep recession.

One expert assets investor told me in 2006 he did'nt understand exchange markets, all the indicators were pointed to a situation which never happened. Now, after reading Financial systems and terrorism expert Loretta Napoleoni, I wonder myself if we maybe underestimate the the phenomenon of economic interdependence after September 11th, 2001.

As Loretta Napoleoni told us:
1- "...the Patriot Act, which was a piece of legislation aimed at blocking the funding to terrorist organisations, eventually created a terrible and detrimental situation in other Countries, in this case Europe as a whole, turning Europe into the money laundering capital of the world, all of this between September 11 and now..."
2- "...Many of the problems that you have heard about regarding the banks are precisely linked to deregulation, to the lack of legislation and to the fact that the banks were granted high levels of freedom with very little control by the State.
What happens with deregulation? In essence, it amounts to the removal of financial barriers and the removal of financial legislation and the controls between two countries. But who has benefited from this?...From the mid-sixties through to 2001, a certain amount of new money, namely the bills printed annually by the Federal Reserve, was illegally taken out of circulation in America in suitcases or cardboard boxes that left the country in the form of boxes required for removals, etc, illegally in other words, and this money went towards satisfying the demand for cash, not only from criminal elements, but also from terrorist organisations and various other sectors of the underground economy..."
3- "...the Patriot Act was only introduced in the United States and is only applicable to the Dollar, so it has totally revolutionised the cash flows of the legal economy and the underground economy alike...no one wanted any Patriot Act introduced in another country that would enable outsiders to scrutinise any dealings between a bank and its customers...the international banks advised their customers to abandon the Dollar Zone and switch to the Euro. The Euro was the new European currency that had just recently come into circulation, so it offered numerous opportunities and, above all, Europe did not have any legislation similar to the Patriot Act and indeed there were tax havens in existence in Europe that worked very well, with no one checking up on anything..."
5- "... this money laundering is occurring via the real estate sector and it is thus very difficult to control because, for example, the Deeds Registry Office on the Costa del Sol has no way of communicating with the Deeds Registry Office in London, so they will never know whether the same company is busy making purchases in various locations in Europe, either simultaneously or at different times and, furthermore, there is no system in place to monitor the financial and cash transactions in Euro that may be taking place across European borders, there is no such thing!"

Europe has become the money laundering capital of the world. This is one more aspect we have to take in account as we think about Europe Union as the only mean to maintain peace and economic development in the old Western Continent.

Do you think Europe Union free market is good for Europeans?

ref: http://www.beppegrillo.it/en/2009/04/european_parliament_loretta_na_1.html

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This year 2009 was particularly interesting as one part of the conference focused on Startups and some of the american bloggers (Scoble heading the team) on the French ones.

According to my readings, mixing the ideas, I will give you my feelings about the differences between EU and US entrepreneurs (startup), expecting to read yours.
1- US entrepreneurs are very well prepared to make public presentation and EU less.
2- EU entrepreneurs are dealing with more state rules (and EU rules) and do need to adapt themselves.
3- US entrepreneurs are in the cloud (Twitter,Facebook,Skype) and EU less.
4- EU entrepreneurs usualy are trying to settle first in their country using their social connections on the ground and US do the same.
5- US entrepreneurs are in an homogeneous environment and do not imagine how is the world outside their borders and EU imagine it quite perfectly.

Despite world globalisation, new technologies, social tools and reds, culture or mankind do not change so quickly. We have great entrepreneurs on both sides, no matter how they make the job (by the way, what is the origin of "entrepreneur"?).
Deezer CEO is french, not well kown in US, but he dealt successfully with the Majors, permitting listening whole song or sonate for free. Maybe this is the main reason of his discretion.

At the end of the day the weaknesses pointed out here are nothing regardless to our natality curve on both sides of the Atlantic.

Are you ready to change for the other continent OR do you feel well in yours?
 

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Two conferences about Enterprise 2.0 in one month, one in San Francisco (US), one in Frankfurt (Germany, Europe), is the business world looking for a magical remedy to the recession?

Obviously the 2.0 "revolution" is boiling for longer time ago than the financial crisis. In the companies the recession had give a push to what could be the end of mass-consumption, mass-production...maybe end of capitalism, version. 19th century.

This video is setting the stage to give you the Best of the two conferences and invite you to comment on:
* http://diwiki.com/index.php/Best_of_Enterprise2.0_Summit

What large companies understand about Enterprise 2.0
What about the workforce
Measuring collaboration benefits: Wiki-experiment in the German Armed Forces

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