September | 2013 | The Reconnected Organization

Are US Americans really working less hours than those in emerging nations S. Korea, Singapore, India? The hours indicated by The Conference Board as shown in Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization, indicate the US is falling far below the typical 40-hr week or 2000 hrs a year. Some segment however are working closer to 3600 hrs a year. According to this HBR article:
“What does bother EMPs [executives, managers, professionals] is when companies use 24-7 connectedness to compensate for organizational inefficiencies and when it significantly undermines their personal lives, productivity, creativity, and ability to think strategically. The complaints we heard most often (from at least three-quarters and as high as 96% of respondents) centered on useless meetings and emails, inadequate technology, disorganized or incompetent C-suites, and unclear decision-making authority.”
“The message is clear: EMPs don’t necessarily mind being connected to work for more than eight hours a day. But they are upset when it happens because leaders don’t respect their time or their official work day is wasted, so they have to make up the time working from their laptops or smartphones at home.”

Tags

e20, e20s, travel, workhackers

I’m heading out this month to take the #Workhackers discussion on the road. This time it is to Brussels, Paris, and Cologne. I’ll be participating in person but there is also a Google+ Hangout planned if you’d like to join in.

First up, I will be participating in the 2nd Global Solutions Summit organized by The Tapscott Group held in Brussels with participants from companies, academic researchers, NGOs and of course the European Commission. The work focuses around the concept of multi-stakeholder networks as approaches to addressing the wold’s challenges as explained by Don Tapscott in his recent talks. Led by Mr. Tapscott and his co-author on Macrowikinomics, Anthony D Williams, it should be a good working group session.

On September 18, there is also an #e20s Enterprise 2.0 and #Workhackers Meetup in Brussels that is open to all enthusiasts of social business. We will discuss the on-ongoing challenges that we practitioners face to accelerating how we collaborate and how we structure our work. Join us for a get together with practitioners from Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Tucson.

On September 19, we’ll take it over to Paris and also the Web live: #e20s Meetup Paris: “The work is broken -let’s hack it!” – Discussion with Rawn Shah. We will meet at a location over by the Bibliotheque Nationale and also try to set up a Google+ Hangout so others can join from around the world. My recent post on Forbes with the same title sparked a good deal of interest worldwide. It was a challenge trying to keep up with the many discussions and shares across the social web that was appearing. Clearly I hit a common pain point and people identify with the need to become self-empowered #workhackers. We will join up to discuss our ideas for hacking work.

Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2013, Paris
(L-to-R: Anna Van Wassanaer, Rawn, Lee Bryant, Harald Schirmer)

Both meetups are organized by the team at Kongress Media which puts on the annual Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris every February or March. I’ve spoken at two of the annual events and they are the place where business thinkers and practitioners gather each year. It is not a trade show for vendors but an actual thought leadership event where top thinkers in social business have gathered each year.

On September 25-26th, I will be in Cologne, Germany for the IOM Summit with a focus on technology, organizations and management. The event is mostly in German, but there are a few English-language panels as well. They do have a good line up of noted speakers:

Anna Van Wassenaer-Golla of Social Business design firm Favela Fabric
Andrew Wright of the Worldwide Internet Challenge,
Oscar Berg of Avega Group AB and blogger of The Content Economy,
my friend and former teammate, Luis Suarez of the global IBM CIO team.

At the last Enterprise2.0 Summit in Paris, I opened the session for Ms. Van Wassenaer-Golla , together on a panel with Lee Bryant (then of Dachis Group, now PostShift) and Harald Schirmer of Continental AG (see the picture). Mr. Berg is a great blogger and business thinker based in Sweden. We also participated on a panel on analytics at Social Business Forum Milan 2012. Mr Luis “living-in-a-world-without-email” Suarez (#lawwe) and I worked together for years in IBM on enterprise transformation. He has been a featured speaker numerous times, and has been interviewed by the NY Times, and many other publications for his expertise as a #workhacker.

All in all, it should be a productive trip, and a little fun–I have not been to Brussels before.