I wonder if the blogosphere is actually quite small?

My current client has around 60,000 employees, half in the UK. But on the active blogs there are probably only 20 or 30 commentors, and many of them post to all the blogs and join the discussion groups too.

Perhaps it's like a pyramid selling thing....after a while you just run out of possible audience and it becomes incestuous.

Reminds me of my favourite corporate statistic: If an organisation has more than 400 people they can spend all their time interacting with each other and never get any actual work done. Wait. I'll just go and see if I can verify that...

Rowing in the same direction

I had a longer session with Toby, the new group CIO, on Friday for an interview we're publishing on the intranet. What a breath of fresh air! He reminds me a lot of Steve Boden, who was my boss several years ago - masses of enthusiasm, really positive, very bright, and with clear ideas of what is the right thing to do. Sadly, Steve was never given the power to achieve what he wanted and eventually had to take early retirement. It's not surprising that the division we worked for no longer exists.

Toby's view is that IT has to operate as a team – in a vertically structured organisation it acts as a kind of horizontal glue. He said if we’re all on a boat (this is a man who likes analogies) then we need to decide where to row. And if everyone is rowing north-west and he finds a couple of people at the back who are rowing south-east, he will have a very serious conversation with them. If they persist he will put them into a penalty box (all the best rowing boats have penalty boxes don’t they?). And if they really don’t want to go the same way as the rest of the team he will help them to find a new team outside the company.

I said that one of the company's problems is that we have a very consensual culture, so if people can’t agree, then no progress is made. He said in that case someone, ie him, has to make decisions. He said if it’s a committee which has authority, “we have to drop a ton of bricks on that”. Steering groups are OK in the right places but sometimes they aren’t, and a single decision-maker is better. And he doesn’t much believe in setting guidelines either.

When I was working for Steve we spent two years, literally, trying to get the two key UK divisions to agree on anything at all - IT or otherwise. It's rumoured that a crucial employee letter was delayed for six months because one division wanted it to start "Dear Miss Jones" and the other one wanted it to say "Dear Samantha"... How can any organisation be so dysfunctional?

PS.

I met the new CIO today. He's cool.

Does blogging work?

For ages there's been a bit of an effort to bring together all the communicators across the company. It hasn't worked very well. People have been focused on their own business units. They haven't seen the point in sharing information. Only the heads of comms or their next in command are usually involved. Being a global company means either a hugely expensive conference or a web meeting/teleconference.

Now we're moving towards becoming One Organisation it seems like a good time to try a blog as a means to bring communicators together. Of course it won't be easy. But it could be worth it. Now I'm told I have to define the exact strategic aims for the blog. No, I think someone may be missing the point somewhere....