Sunday, June 13, 2010

Open Leadership by Charlene Li

I am reading Open Leadership by Charlene Li  and looking at it from the point of view of career,  performance and development. I plan to highlight the things that catch my attention. Sometimes it is compilation of my tweets while reading the book away from my desk.

 Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead

Chapter 1: Why Giving Up Control is inevitable
Who should read this chapter: If you are a CEO and have time to read only one chapter, read this one.


In the first Chapter Charlene makes the case that openness is inevitable for most organizations. Just 20 years back, countries, not just companies, were able to keep their people in the dark for weeks together about developments outside. Today information gets out in minutes, if not seconds. So being open and transparent and enabling people to make decisions based on all the information available is the only way to succeed.

Chapter 2:  The Ten element of Openness

In Chapter 2, Charlene gets into the details of what openness means for the CEO, a project team, the Human Resources team and so on. I found compelling arguments for the CEO to blog, the CIO to invest in collaboration and micro blogging tools and the HR executives to insist on openness. She also suggests that the sharing culture of the next generation work force will demand that you be open.
  • When a CEO blogs she can tell the mission of her org in her own words and provide operating updates. #charleneli #openleadership p27
  • Use of microblogging by teams speeds up product development #charleneli #openleadership - Some people are overwhelmed a bit. But it works.
  • #charleneli talks about an onboarding use case in c2 of #openleadership #page26
  • The net generation believes that sharingness is next to godliness #charleneli #openleadership - r u ready for them?
Chapter 3 : Objectives determine how open you will be?
Chapter 3 covers the engagement pyramid. Watching, Sharing, Commenting, Producing and Curating are the five levels in an engagement pyramid. In the US, about 80% watch, 61% share, 36% comment, 24% produce and 1% curate.
This chapter also talks about creating an action plan based on the objectives of the organization. Charlene says that the first step is to identify the strategic goal and put the learning systems (I think she means social-intelligence gathering systems) in place to support that goal. She also says that you need to determine the best approach, the level of openness and the ability to be an open organization.

I see people executives and talent managers playing a very important role in creating the above action plan. Since people are at the center of this plan, this is something that the customer facing business units and human resource executives need to work together on. Conflicting messages and directives from different departments may confuse employees.

Chapter 4 :Understanding and measuring the benefits of being open
Chapter 5 : Structuring Openness with Sandbox Covenants
Chapter 6 : Orchestrating your open Strategy
Chapter 7 : Open Leadership Mindsets and Traits
Chapter 8 : Nurturing Open Leadership
Chapter 9 : The Failure Imperative
Chapter 10 : How Openenss Transforms Organizations

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