Tag: futureofwork

EA: Why Being Worst Matter More than They Think?

It seems that beating the tobacco companies and those behind environmental negligence to the title of ‘Worst Company in America’ has not been an exercise in humility for Electronic Arts

 

In a statement to Gamer web site Kontaku, EA said “We’re sure that British Petroleum, AIG, Philip Morris, and Halliburton are all relieved they weren’t nominated this year. We’re going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide.”

 

The statement was described as arrogant and dismissive by Paul Tassi, Forbes contributor. I would add short sighted too.

 

EA are pointing to their worldwide sales achievement to dismiss the vote as inconsequential. However, what they are forgetting in their hubris is that sales is the classic ‘lagging’ indicator. Sales are recorded monthly and publicly announced quarterly and annually in most businesses. Sentiment, on the other hand, is a leading indicator. A dip in employee engagement means that customers are about to become unhappy. A dip in customer sentiment means that your sales are about to be hit. Robert Kaplan and David Norton introduced the business world to this cause-and-effect chain decades ago. Customers drive revenues, your business produces value that your customers love or hate, your staff drive the business, your investment in your staff motivates or demotivates them. Simple but a point that the EA spokesman appears to be missing.

 

Now I don’t know the extent to which gamers are about to extract their ire but I do know when a company has spoken too soon. And EA have. EA should reflect on the feedback. Their customers are telling them that they don’t feel respected, that their culture is corporate over creativity, that they are emptying wallets but giving only the bare minimum back.

 

In the light of that sentiment, they should really not be sitting on laurels made of  last quarter’s or last year’s sales. They are gone. Sentiment like this can gather momentum, capture the imagination of a well connected community and have far reaching consequences down the line.  EA should have thought before they spoke. The impact of  the ignominy behind this award is yet to be felt.

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Hippo Decision Making

According to Andrew McAfee of the MIT Centre for Digital Business in an article in MIT Sloan Management Review many companies still practice decision making by Hippo. Actually he refers to it as HPPO,  the Highest Paid Persons Opinion. 

This resonated with me having just completed the draft for a chapter on networked decision making in our upcoming book Decision Sourcing, published by Gower. 

McAfee argues that the next wave of enterprise 2.0 will see organisations make decisions in new ways. Decision making by HPPO is in sharp decline.

 

The book argues that the current default mechanic for organisational decision making , the hierarchy, has literally run out of steam. It’s origins are rooted in a time where capital was scarce and labour was abundant. The top of the hierarchy was probably occupied by the owner of the capital. They also had the most business experience, the most knowledge and enough life experience to co-ordinate the work of everyone else. In a knowledge based economy, these things just don’t align any more.  One of the hottest jobs at the moment, that of ‘community manager’ didn’t exist five years ago. If you are managing a community manager today, you have most likely never been a community manager yourself.  As a manager of a community manager you better be good at co-ordinating the work of others, the primary purpose of management because you are not adding too much in the way of domain experience.

 

Social Decision Making, those decisions made by Socially aligned organisations will take many more inputs, many more perspectives all helped by the automation afforded by enterprise social platforms. There will be no decision made simply because of the HiPPO. They will undoubtedly be better for it.