Witty's Number

 

According to Management Today, new GSK chief exec Andrew Witty has proposed that "instead of the existing seven large global centres, GSK’s hunt for new drugs should be tackled by many more, much smaller teams – a maximum of 80 scientists per group, in fact".

The rationale is apparently that:

"The new model is based on the assumption that smaller, more dispersed teams will naturally tend to pursue a broader portfolio of products. Each of them may be rather less lucrative than one of the old blockbusters – which are anyway getting much harder to find – but the damage caused by one of them failing will also be a lot less traumatic. Less of a roller-coaster, more of a gentle drive in the country."

That makes sense, although I think there's something about the smaller number too.

When I was an HR Director at Ernst & Young, we started to organise our audit teams into groups ('stables') of 50-80 too, in order to improve collaboration within teams.  A group of 80 would include up to 10 managers and we felt that this was about the maximum number of people who could work well together, and through them, bring the full group of about 80 people together into a cohesive team.

Dunbar's analysis may suggest we can network effectively with a slightly higher number of people that this, but I think for real, effective focus and team working, 80's about right.

 

Technorati Tags: Management Today,Andrew Witty,GSK,smaller teams,Dunbar's number

Leadership pulse findings on Relational Capital

 

 

Theresa Welbourne at eepulse (see also Energize Engage) reports finding that relational capital (here defined as relationships with all stakeholders not just employees) is more important than human capital for building long-term competitive advantage in an organisation.

Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/07/leadership-pulse-findings-on-relational.html

 

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Collaborating for business performance

 

I've only just come across this research via Steve Roesler's All Things Workplace.

“Meetings Around the World: The Impact of Collaboration on Business Performance”, published recently by Microsoft, Verizon and Frost & Sullivan, measured companies' “collaborativeness” through an index consisting of the quality (the nature and extent of collaboration that allows people to work together as well as an organisation’s culture and processes that encourage teamwork) and capability (an organisation’s orientation, infrastructure and technologies) of collaboration.

Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/07/collaborating-for-business-performance.html

 

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HR is the new Facebook

This article in the same edition of Harvard Business Review is quite interesting too:Why did we ever go into HR?:

In particular;

"HR is poised to become the Facebook of the modern corporation. Many knowledge-management initiatives have failed because employees weren’t inspired to use them. Yet the rise of social-networking sites points to a widespread desire to connect with others who share your goals and interests. HR is uniquely positioned to connect people—and therefore knowledge, expertise, and mentorship possibilities—across an organization. For instance, leadership-development program alumni can participate in annual reunions hosted by a firm’s top brass and serve as advisers to current program students. Follow-ups such as these—and the programs themselves—help build networks of people from disparate parts of the organization and with vastly different areas of expertise."

I think the examples are a bit week, but I agree with the sentiment, the general importance of social networking, and HR's key role in making this happen.

 

Technorati Tags: HR,social networking,Facebook

Organisation structure design is dead!

This blog has recently been focusing on web / enterprise / HR 2.0 but the reason that I've called it 'The New Social Business' is that I want to focus much more widely on all the other non-technological factors and activities which are supporting and enabling major social changes in the workplace.

So I was interested in an article in this month's Harvard Business Review on Managing Corporate Social Networks (Adam Kleinbaum and Michael Tushman).

Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/07/organisation-structure-design-is-dead.html

 

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Web 2.0 in professional services / legal firms

After having discussed the main business impacts of operating in the networked world, today's session then went on to explore the use of web 2.0 to support the changes that are necessary.

A highlight of the conversation for me was a discussion on the importance of face-to-face communication and the need to use technology to optimise this:

Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/07/web-20-in-professional-services-legal.html

 

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Leading into the networked world in professional services / legal firms

This morning, I spoke at an event on the impact of the networked world in professional services (with a fairly heavy emphasis on legal firms) organised by Winmark’s network for firm managing partners, NetworkMP (as well as some representatives from their Marketing Director and IT Director networks.

The event was chaired by Phil Williams at Rocketseed.

We started with a presentation by Phil Walker, VP at Capgemini, who talked about he main trends impacting professional services. One of these is that everything and everyone is connected (although this only applies to developed economies – 60% of the world still needs to be linked in). Relationships within the connected world are increasingly important and need to be nurtured – this requires person-to-person interaction as well as via a computer. Capgemini have introduced ‘talk to me on Friday’ - in which people who are in the building are encouraged to talk to each other rather than sending each other an email – and which has led to other networking activities for example, coffee clubs.

Continued at: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2008/07/leading-into-networked-world-in.html

 

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• jon [dot] ingham [at] social [dash] advantage [dot] com

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