The Next Organization

Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself (TED Video)

During my first job (and also first work leadership role), I had a guy in my team, who couldn't complete any project while having enough skills to do it. I was all the time wondering why and found out later that he has always substituted his goal with a imagination of achieving it. It all came from his stuttering when he was small. When other kids mocked at him, he turned to things that he felt comfortable with and created in his mind how he achieved things he couldn't in reality. This habit however stopped him from doing things before he could finish them. I was trying to help him by building a network of people, who encouraged him to accomplish the find project well to enjoy the real feeling of achievement. Unfortunately, he was fired before he could do it, right after I quit my job going to study overseas.

This TED presentation reminded me of that case. This is a very trivial, but unknown fact to many. Enjoy!

Beautiful presentation - Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us

I found on MinhLH's ZingMe page link to this interesting way to deliver the message: for creative jobs, the most important motivating factors are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Why and how companies should be prepared for technology proliferation, even of the one they helped to create

No time in history before, technology is changing at the pace we are experiencing now. As the world is connected, network effect accelerates technology adoption and drives proliferation and commoditization very quickly. Once technology is everywhere, it is no longer a tool, but becomes the state of the environment that organizations operate on. Technology however is becoming embedded in our lives and therefore changes human behaviors. These fundamental shifts demand organizations not only to learn how to use technology, but to adapt to new environment and behaviors. The question therefore is not "how to use the technology", but "what my organization should be" given technology is the environment.

Let's look at a couple of examples to see how the fundamental shifts happen and change the rule of the game.

Just more than 10 years back, when doing commerce on the Internet was still very rare, most companies were trying to learn how to use it. The dotcom bubble motivated massive number of fiber optic cables to be laid, which literary commoditized the bandwidth. Enabling financial services flowering and quickly became readily available with minimal cost. Application vendors also made online transaction a standard part of their offerings, sometimes even free. For companies, the word eCommerce seems to disappear. However, companies had to go through a phase of redefining themselves given that the majority of their suppliers, customers and competitors now have the ability to do business using the net. Making it worst, many customers are getting used to it, thereby changing their purchasing behavior and refuse to do business otherwise.

Let's use government as another case. Governments within about one of two decades years back started to bring more PC into their business. The idea at the beginning was to automate their administrative works. However, as PCs and network are available at most of the citizens and organizations they are dealing with, the purpose of eGovernment changed. It's now how government should operate when parties they are dealing with are using and gradually demanding using PCs and network in their transactions. Peer pressure from governments in the same groups is another force to drive this change. Unfortunately, many didn't understand this and spent their money investing into technology without rethinking the way they organize and work. The disaster of the CP 112 program in Vietnam is one painful example of this.

The third example is different in the sense that it's about the company that created the "technology" itself. Founded in 1994, Monster.com was the first Internet job board. Since then, the company has grown to 75 million resumes on file and covers now 36 countries in the world. The new industry was so successful that it even increased the job changing wave in the United States, according to Stevenson's "The Impact of the Internet on Worker Flows" report. The concept and especially behavior changed leading to implementation of Internet recruiting solution in large companies themselves. More importantly, companies have to pay more attention to recruiting and retaining their talents to survive the new wave.

How the Net changes human behavior toward environment

Being an environmental activist is getting so easy now and anyone can with just a few minutes. How? Just think about how you use the net. The net has become the ideal medium for every environmental activist to give a hand to change people's perception and thus behaviors. You, too can be one.

For long, was aware of a few things I can do to my environment, from setting an example of not throwing trash to street to joining social activities to help clean up the environment. However, I realized that I could do more.