This new global and transparent environment may worry many of our managers, and may be threatening to some of our politicians. But you will soon notice, from my comments and my analysis, that I am optimistic about changes . I believe that, in the same way that transparency in markets has generated more efficient markets, transparency in organizations and institutions will lead us to more efficient societies and fairer and more sustainable development models.

” Transparency in markets generates more efficient markets; transparency in organizations creates more efficient societies and fairer and more sustainable development models”

As we have mentioned before, the essence of this new Era is mass collaboration. The thrust of the Age of Collaboration is irresistible today, driven by the emergence of new models of value creation based on open collaboration between global communities: “Wikinomy”: mass markets change everything. In their new book Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams refer to Mass Collaboration as an economy where millions of people collaborate through blogs, wikis and chats in a new space for the flow of communication, knowledge and ideas that we call the “blogosphere”. This gives rise to new work environments in which, through wikis, workers can collaborate and innovate beyond the borders of their organizations. Consumers become “prosumers” – producers and consumers at the same time – and actively participate in the creation of goods and services. And value chains and business models become global, with partners collaborating in networks as equals from anywhere in the world.

The case of Gold Corp. One of the stories mentioned by Don Tapscott in his book Wikinomics illustrates crowdsourcing well as a new form of value creation. This is the case of Gold Corp, a Canadian mining company that was facing growth problems because it could not find new gold deposits. Its team of geologists was aware that these deposits had to be somewhere on the huge property that the company owned in Canada, but they were not able to locate them. It was then that Rob McEwen, CEO of GoldCorp, decided to publish on the Internet all the geological information of the mining operation (no less than 225,000 km2) and, through a public tender, asked all the geologists in the world for help to locate new deposits. Until that moment, the geological information of the terrain had remained locked in the safe: it was the company’s most precious secret. In a few weeks, more than 1000 virtual gold prospectors from 50 different countries were participating in the search. Responses came from people and institutions of all kinds: students, geologists, chemists, military, research departments, and hobbyists. With these new contributions, Gold Corp was able to find considerable amounts of gold and its stock market valuation skyrocketed. McEwen had a small group of geologists on staff, and they were possibly very expert, but he realized that the minds best suited to finding new deposits were beyond the boundaries of his company.

The “Long Tail” Economy. From mass markets to niche markets . In his book “The Long Tail Economy”, Chris Anderson shows us how the Internet has made new business opportunities possible in the consumer sector of books, films and music, based on the Long Tail model. The essence of this model is the following: the combination of millions of modest sales of minority titles is capable of generating more income than the sales of the greatest hits, making us move from mass markets to niche markets. “Long tail” is the name with which, colloquially, a well-known characteristic of the statistical distributions that we can observe in the markets is called, and that applies to any large enough sample. For example, we can affirm, without much risk of being wrong, that 20% of the Spanish population owns 80% of the country’s wealth. And, similarly, that approximately 20% of them contribute 80% of companies’ sales. In its application to the business world, the “Long Tail” economy has meant a new paradigm of innovation in traditional business models. The best-known examples have perhaps been in the book and record distribution businesses. In its stores, El Corte Inglés basically offers the best-selling books, but not those that would only be bought by a very small number of people. In the same way, if we look for a record at Fnac, we will find the records that interest a wide audience. The high cost of distribution and storage does not allow them to offer other alternatives. However, Web 2.0 has changed the laws of distribution and the rules of the market. Physical restrictions are no longer significant in online business models such as those of Amazon or Rhapsody. This allows them to have a very wide catalog of products, with which they can cover the tastes and interests of a larger group of customers. Amazon, for example, has a catalog of more than 2 million books, and Rhapsody offers users about a million songs. In the graphic representation of sales, the upper left part (the head) would correspond to best-sellers. The right part, which seems to stretch towards infinity, would represent the products sold in a few copies. This “long tail” is what the Internet makes profitable.

Maybe it’s time to change something…

In 1900, the average life expectancy in the United States was 47 years. Only 6% of homes had a telephone, and only 14% had a bathtub. The car fleet consisted of 8,000 vehicles, and there were 144 miles of paved roads in the country, just over 230 kilometers. And a particularly revealing fact: at that time, right at the beginning of the last century, 42% of the workforce was still dedicated to agriculture. Needless to say, the situation has changed radically. In almost all areas, today’s world has very little to do with that of the early twentieth century. However, there is a rather striking exception. Not everything has changed at the same pace. To prove this, it is enough to analyze the situation in the United States in 1900 from another perspective, emphasizing other aspects of reality: by then there was already the standard job description, and production planning, cost accounting and profit analysis were also beginning to be common practices. Not only that. Companies already applied financial controls, variable salaries and incentives, and had human resources departments. Surprising, isn’t it? In 1900 the same management practices were applied that we still use today, more than a century later… This means that something is not working well in the system. There is a worrying gap. Society today is absolutely different from that of 1900. Everything has changed. People, infrastructures, the flow of information, the possibilities of communicating and accessing increasingly broad and shared knowledge. And yet, management practices remain substantially the same as they were in 1900, at the beginning of the last century. In other words, companies are trying to face an absolutely new situation with tools from the past. And so the results cannot be satisfactory, neither for the organizations nor for the people who are part of them. That is why I argue that, perhaps, the time has come to change something… What do you think? We have to reinvent ourselves as leaders and as people, yes. But where do we start? What can we do? Surely no one has the exact answer but, in my experience, there are three fundamental keys that can help us face change. We need:

• Innovate in Management as we know it today, creating flexible organizations, designed for people, that are not hostile to innovation and that allow us to fulfill ourselves and give the best of ourselves

• Develop new capabilities to reinvent ourselves as managers and make the most of the enormous opportunities for value creation offered by the Era of Mass Collaboration.

• Find new sources of energy. In times of accelerated change, energy, and not time, is the most valuable resource. The day-to-day reality prevents us from seeing the future, and ends up exhausting our passion.

It’s dangerous to stay in your “Comfort Zone.” They’ll eventually find you

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always achieved.” HAYNES

It happens to us very often. We are convinced that everything is going well, and that we have a bright future… How can it be otherwise, if so far we have received nothing but congratulations for our management, and the latest performance appraisal has been very positive? But the truth is that important things are happening around us . Things that could turn our situation around in the blink of an eye. The world is changing and, perhaps, you should ask yourself: How do these changes affect my customers? What impact will they have on the competitiveness of my products and services? How does all this affect me personally? How will these changes affect my future employability? In other words, if we don’t want to get stuck in a too comfortable position, we need to seriously consider what the leadership of the future will be like, how we can move towards new models of collective intelligence management in the Age of Collaboration, and what the models of value creation through people will be like in the new era.

It will be difficult for you to imagine that management is going to change. It is normal. It is always difficult to imagine that something that has changed so little in recent decades, can now do so in a short period of time. In addition, after living years and years of orthodox management, in hierarchical organizations, with a high level of bureaucracy and a management system capable of killing the passion of the most loyal of our employees, we can be sure that the changes that are required are not obvious at all, and they are not going to be easy at all. These changes are particularly difficult to anticipate if you have already reached your “comfort zone”, and you are convinced that management is a tool for managing the status quo . In other words, it will be very difficult for you to change if you think that this management thing consists of things continuing to work well, as always, and that if the customer or the “smart” person on duty discovers that there is a problem, the only thing to do is solve it with a patch.

Because the fact is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide reality. Mass collaboration has a radical impact on the transparency of organizations . The free flow of communication means that today almost everything is visible to users and collaborators. This is good news because, similar to what has happened with the Internet in the markets – we have seen that it has created more efficient markets – transparency in organizations creates more flexible and efficient organizations. The problem is that, in many cases, we continue to operate with opaque structures. The organizations we have created – both in the public and private spheres – are largely based on the opacity of their structures and the ignorance, on the part of their members, of the reality of the organization. And that situation is, today, simply unsustainable. There is no point in hiding: they will eventually find you.

Transparency is transformed into trust. And this trust – of employees, users, customers and, in short, of society – represents an asset of enormous value for organisations when it comes to addressing the new challenges and opportunities of the Network Society. Before we go any further, we must have the humility to recognize that the legacy of orthodox management that has brought us here is not enough to carry us into the future. Remember that networked organizations become transparent, and that there is nowhere to hide anymore: they will eventually find you.

We must have the courage to reinvent ourselves as leaders to explore the new models of social value creation that the Network Society offers us; to develop the necessary capacities and to make them a reality in increasingly open, transparent and global collaborative networks. And we must do so without forgetting, in our daily action, Keynes’ warning:

“The real difficulty in changing the course of any organization lies not in developing new ideas, but in getting rid of old ones.”

You can check out the presentation Maybe it’s time for you to leave your comfort zone .

Leadership 2.0: The Leadership of the Future

As we have seen, the world has changed. Everything is in permanent change around us: technology, consumers, our customers, our suppliers and collaborators. We are at the beginning of a revolutionary era for business, a new era in which the key is to share knowledge. It is the Age of Mass Collaboration and, in this new scenario, traditional leadership – associated with the industrial stage – is incapable of providing an adequate response to the challenges we face. And we are not talking about incremental changes, small adjustments. The Age of Collaboration is causing substantial changes in value creation models , and many companies that have triumphed in previous decades will disappear if they are not able to change and adjust to the new times. According to Gary Hamel, there are three reasons that force us to innovate in our management models: Firstly, the acceleration of changes. In this world, the future is less and less an extrapolation of the past. Organizations must change and adapt to change at a speed they have never faced. And it is becoming increasingly difficult for many companies to stay ahead of the curve of change. When we look around us, we don’t just see companies that were once models of the past and are now lagging behind, but we also see how entire industries are struggling to remain relevant and survive the business model changes of the digital age. The second challenge is that companies are facing a competitive landscape, with no sweepsto protect dominant companies , no regulations, no entry restrictions, no ignorant customers, no opaque markets. Every day we see new start-ups challenging the dominance of traditional companies in their sector. We see, for example, how

Skype has been able to question the business models of large telecommunications companies, how Ryanair has done the same in the world of air transport and how, more recently, Apple has made a splash in the world of mobile phones with its iPhone .

The third challenge is that knowledge is becoming a “commodity”. It is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to survive simply by maintaining unique skills. Knowledge and skills tend to circulate freely in a global market, making it practically impossible to create and maintain unique skills for long. The best way to protect ourselves is to make innovation the work of all our employees every day. In the same way, companies are going to have to be innovative when it comes to protecting their intellectual and human capital. Faced with a new paradigm, we must review the mental models that we have created, and that we have used until now to move around the world. This is the paradox: we must open our minds and we must enter the new world to build the new maps. We have no choice but to reinvent ourselves as leaders, as organizations and as people to respond to new demands. A concrete example: it is true that the “command and command” – which until now has prevailed in organizations – has allowed us to create efficient and scalable organizations; but it is also true that these organizations tend to be inflexible when it comes to doing something different from what they have always done; their cultures are not very prone to change and, in many cases, hostile to innovation; and what is more important: they are generally deathly boring and unable to achieve the trust, creativity and passion of the people who are part of the organization. However, perhaps the greatest incompatibility of the organizations we have created so far – whether they are governments, political parties, institutions or companies – is that they do not sustain themselves when exposed to the increasing levels of transparency demanded by the Network Society. And I am not referring exclusively to transparency in values – a field in which NGOs are possibly an example – but to transparency in the added value and contribution of people. The reality is that the traditional command and command leads to a leadership style based on personal affinities, with low tolerance for criticism, and where too often personal interests are confused with the goals of the organization. We need a new vision of the leadership of the future, which we have called Leadership 2.0. A vision capable of stimulating and channeling new talent, and of making the most of opportunities in the Age of Collaboration. The label “2.0” is not a fad or a whim. It refers to an improved version of our society and of ourselves; a more participatory, open and transparent version, and that from now on will be present in all orders: in governance models, in action

Politics, in the Organizations, in the Companies and, of course, also in the field of Non-Governmental Organizations.

Creating value in the Age of Collaboration requires imagination, creativity and passion; it is about creating organizations designed for people, in which leadership and innovation are a job shared by all.

The only possible way is for us to reinvent ourselves as leaders. The image of the charismatic leader, the genius who is at the top of the pyramid of organizations and is capable of knowing everything and having an answer for everything, has been outdated and obsolete. It simply no longer works. Today, as leaders, we cannot be the only repositories of the answer; we cannot decide, alone, what to do or not to do, or what products to launch. That belongs to a past in which markets were stable, we knew the competition and we had made similar decisions on numerous occasions. In this new Era of Collaboration and knowledge, we can no longer continue to be the decision-makers .

Faced with a new paradigm, we must review the mental models that we have created, and that we have used until now to move around the world. This is the challenge: we must open our minds and we must enter the new world to build the new maps . We have no choice but to reinvent ourselves as leaders, as organizations and as people to respond to new demands. A concrete example: it is true that the “command and command” – which until now has prevailed in organizations – has allowed us to create efficient and scalable organizations; but it is also true that these organizations tend to be inflexible when it comes to doing something different from what they have always done; their cultures are not prone to change and, in many cases, hostile to innovation; and what is more important: they are usually deathly boring and unable to achieve the trust, creativity and passion of the people who are part of the organization.

However, perhaps the greatest incompatibility of the organizations we have created so far – whether they are governments, political parties, institutions or companies – is that they do not sustain themselves when exposed to the increasing levels of transparency demanded by the Network Society. And I am not referring exclusively to transparency in values, but to transparency in the added value and contribution of people . The reality is that traditional command and command leads to a leadership style based on personal affinities, with low tolerance for criticism, and where too often personal interests are confused with the purposes of the organization. You can consult the presentation Leadership in the Age of Collaboration .

Digital Immigrant Bosses

The arrival of digital natives in families, at work, and in markets, has turned previous generations – parents, bosses, teachers, politicians, etc. – into authentic “digital immigrants”. The two groups have different ways of learning, feeling, and understanding the world, but they are doomed to live together. Digital natives essentially learn by interacting, testing, and correcting; they trust their intuition and feelings, they are open to new experiences, and they use their creativity as part of learning. On the other hand, we, digital immigrants, trust our experience, our ability to reason; we trust the manual, we analyze everything, and before we take a step, we make sure that it is the right one. Lest it break! That is, in our learning process we use more the left hemisphere , which processes information analytically and sequentially, step by step, in a logical and linear way, while they learn using more the right part of the brain , which corresponds to creativity and emotions, following an intuitive process instead of logical, looking for images, symbols and feelings. It is not surprising that this is so. I still remember when they brought the first color television home. My father installed it very carefully. It occurred to me to turn up the volume a little more than necessary and I was left with the remote in my hand. As it could not be otherwise, I got a “cogoteazo “, which is the Canarian version of the colleja, and my father added the usual phrase: “You don’t touch it!” Likewise, if you tried to open a drawer of your grandmother’s dresser with a lot of verve and you were left with the handle in your hand, this time it was your mother who gave you the slap and told you the de rigueur Don’t touch! This “digital immigrant” syndrome can be found in practically all parents, teachers, managers, politicians and business leaders. We seek our way in the choppy waters of the Age of Collaboration, a scenario that sometimes seems unknown and hostile to us. The reality is that everything would be easier if we had the humility to recognize that most of what we have learned in the past has been very useful to us to get here, but it is not a guarantee of the future. In other words, it has helped us to make a reasonable career, give our children a good education, have a comfortable house, a couple of cars in the garage, a plasma TV in the living room and a mobile phone in our pocket. But very little of this knowledge will help us to understand our children, educate our future students or manage our digital collaborators. These differences are evident in our relationships. We try to communicate with our young people but, often, it seems that we speak different languages. We do not know if what we need is an updated dictionary or a new approach that allows us to get closer to their way of thinking. Something similar happens in companies. The boss – almost always a “digital immigrant” – is not able to understand his younger collaborators well.

He is not capable, therefore, of inspiring and motivating his team, and he senses that, sooner rather than later, they will end up taking their talent to another company that is more open and closer to their demands. Inspiring and motivating our employees is an essential part of our daily work as managers. But we cannot effectively perform this basic function of leadership if we do not know the expectations, aspirations, desires and needs of the new generations of young people. I believe that it is not a question of presenting the members of the new generation – fully digital – as gifted for everything, as described by the so-called “Einstein Generation”. Nor is it a question of seeing them as apathetic, irresponsible young people incapable of committing beyond their personal interests. We simply have to accept that they are the first generation of fully digital young people; that is, they have grown up with the Game Boy in the cradle and the Internet in their homes and schools and, as a result, have developed interactive skills far superior to ours. These young people have a new mentality that will require us to make an effort to understand and adapt to their way of interacting with their environment and their way of seeing life. Will we be able to respond to the challenge of understanding them and getting them to give the best of themselves in our organizations? If we look at their motivations , it is not surprising that they are different from ours. The logic is very simple: in most cases, they know that they have a “0” chance of improving their parents’ standard of living and, at the same time, they know that they have a “1” chance of improving their parents’ quality of life . Therefore, it should not surprise us that they prioritize the balance between personal life and work, and that they are able to plan their own personal agenda, which includes many leisure activities: hobbies, vacations, etc. In short, digital natives have a different mentality from the one that has characterized previous generations. They are authentic, express their opinions clearly, and expect reciprocity from their interlocutors. With them, the “command and command” is over. They pursue recognition, try to leave their personal stamp on everything they do, and only exploit their extraordinary talent if the work amuses them. Otherwise, they will look for a better place to develop their skills.

New spaces for communication and collective learning

Digital natives have leveraged the technology platform to create innovative forms of communication that we, digital immigrants, are not yet familiar with. Here may be some of the keys:

Listen to me! As I have mentioned before, digital natives need to express their opinion and put their personal stamp on what they do. Through the blog they can make their points of view, their knowledge and their vision of life known to others always from a personal approach. It is no longer necessary to find a publisher. Anyone can have their blog, updated as often as they want. Its success will only depend on what it tells, on whether the content is interesting for the rest of the users. As a result, the number of topics covered has expanded, as well as the approaches to each of these topics. Access to multiple sources of information in a transparent and global way has led them to question the authenticity and authority of traditional organizations, whether it is family, school, university or business. I am looking for people like me! The new era brings with it a previously unimaginable possibility: that of finding “kindred spirits” anywhere on the planet. Through social networks, increasingly specific tagging of content, or working with profiles, the user can locate people with common interests and tastes. And not only that. They can also communicate and interact freely and constantly with those “soul mates” who live in any other part of the world. This is how portals and social networks with increasingly specific themes emerge, true meeting points for users who share interests. You only have to go back 15 years to understand the scope of this phenomenon. What, then, were our real chances of finding in the company, on the street or in a bar, another person who is fond, say, of ornithology, or diatonic accordions? No more irrelevant information! By using a news aggregator (RSS) we can instantly obtain the content that really interests us and is looking for. Gone are the times when our information didn’t even exist or, in the best of cases, was buried among tons of irrelevant content (at least for us). You no longer need to “swallow” a news or an entire newspaper to find the two pearls we were waiting for.

Follow me! The use of micro-blogging services has accentuated the fluid nature of interpersonal communication in the new era. Through different devices (Internet, mobile, etc.) users can be in constant communication if they wish. The channel is always open. Search, don’t order! As Gmail’s motto says, digital natives no longer waste time filing information on shelves and folders. They simply look for what they need at all times, and they find it instantly. The volume of information is so large, and the physical space so cheap – close to cost 0 – that it is no longer necessary to delete or summarize the content. All you have to do is enter a keyword in the search engine. They know that the important thing is not to try to introduce into their brains the huge amount of information they receive every day, but to be able to find it “just in time”, when they need it. The relevance of these changes is not only essential to understand our children. It also directly affects companies. Organizations that are not able to understand these new ways of communicating and the motivations that originate them will hardly be able to attract and retain new digital talent. Much less in an environment of constant change like the one we are facing. According to the United States Department of Labor, today’s intern, by the time they are 38 years old, will have worked in at least 10 different companies. That means that if our organization is not able to understand, stimulate and motivate them, they will not be able to count on their talent. And without this new digital talent, our organization will be irrelevant in the not too distant future.

Leading is talking

Today, leading is equivalent to talking. Web 2.0 has opened up new spaces in which citizens can converse freely, without limits and without physical barriers: the blogosphere is a global and distributed network of conversations; social networks are spaces for linking people and sharing; and wikis are spaces for the collaborative construction of content. As we pointed out, we must develop new capabilities to reinvent ourselves as managers and make the most of the enormous opportunities for value creation offered by the Age of Mass Collaboration.

And the only way to achieve this is by leading from authenticity, transparency and communication.

Hence, today more than ever, we need the ability to converse ,to actively participate in the conversations that our customers, our suppliers, and our own employees are having. Only through those conversations can we understand how changes affect us on a personal level, and how they affect our organizations. Only then can we know what to do and not to do, what new products and services our customers demand, and what kind of organizations we should design to attract and retain new digital talent . Markets are conversations. This is the first conclusion of the Cluetrain Manifesto , which as early as 1999 anticipated the impact that the Internet would have on markets (consumers) and organizations. The manifesto pointed out that, precisely thanks to these new conversations, new and powerful forms of social organization and new forms of collective knowledge were going to emerge. He also advanced that organizations should change to accommodate the new levels of transparency that have emerged in conversations between consumers and organizations, and among the company’s own employees. If you think about it, this is very good news. To develop the new skills, it is not necessary to go back to university, or enroll in sophisticated management courses at the best business schools; nor do we need to buy the latest book on Web 2.0 . We just have to learn to interact with the new reality, and to participate in the conversations that take place every day between our colleagues, customers, collaborators and friends. In other words,

the central thing is not to access information, but to access conversations and actively participate in them. It is these new conversations that will allow us to develop our capabilities as leaders; they will allow us to know the needs of our customers and find the new talent that our organizations require . Our challenge is to be able to read the conversations correctly; to read the signs of change and anticipate the future as a source of value and competitiveness for our organizations. It is, therefore, a matter of generating the new maps that will serve as a reasonable guide to navigate the new world that is to come.

“The central thing is not to access information, but to access conversations and actively participate in them. It is these new conversations that will allow us to develop our capabilities as leaders; which will allow us to know the needs of our customers and find the new talent that our organizations require.”

How the changes impact us

On a personal level, you should ask yourself what stage you are at within this space of conversations: do you read blogs regularly?, are you part of a social network?, do you make comments on forums and blogs?, do you maintain a blog yourself and upload your videos to YouTube? Do you not do any of these activities yet? Then, you can transfer these questions to your organization. It is very important for the organization to interact with the new reality. It is not enough to have a website to communicate what we do because, as we have said, the essential thing is not to access information, but to access conversations and participate in them actively. In this way we can develop new skills, learn about the new needs for social action and find the new talent that our organizations require.

New Organizations 2.0

I think we will agree that, over time, we have come to build exceptionally complex organizations, full of departments and hierarchies, full of instructions and rules, of very complex business processes and decision-making. In the current scenario, marked by accelerated change, competitiveness and the constant flow of information, our organizations have become inefficient, slow, bureaucratic and, what is worse, deathly boring, capable of annihilating the passion and creativity of the most fervent of our collaborators. The good news is that Web 2.0 is showing us every day new ways to deal with these limits, characteristic of traditional organizations: from the harnessing of collective intelligence to the creation of an open operating system to the creation of an open operating system to the
Linux or an encyclopedia of free content that we can all edit such as Wikipedia, to the construction of social networks such as Myspace, Xing or Facebook, where hundreds of millions of people can share and create.

The “Getting Real” philosophy applied to Organizations 2.0

Although the “Getting Real” philosophy was born in the highly innovative environment of technology companies, I believe that its reach goes much further. Some of its principles can serve as a guide in the exploration of new forms of leadership for organizations. These are the ones that have been enormously valid in our own entrepreneurial experience:

• Experiment with reality. Avoid detours, just “Make It Happen.” Don’t waste time simulating reality. Don’t spend your time trying to document reality with detail diagrams and functional specifications. Create it and experiment with it. Launch something that really works as fast as you can. It’s the best way to build momentum. It’s okay to build fewer things, skip the details, and take shortcuts in the process as long as it allows us to get the project up and running faster.

• Cultivate simplicity as a value. Perhaps it’s better to simplify a process rather than train people to deal with complexity. Over time, organizations get used to complexity. They don’t notice it, and they tend to increase it. In daily practice, not everyone feels capable of coming up with creative ideas; but everyone can point to something that could be done in a much simpler way. In addition, simplicity makes it possible for new people to join the organization more quickly, and to be productive in less time. If we come to believe that simplicity is as real and important as cost, then we can make more efforts to achieve simplicity

• Remember that “less is more”. In real life, when it comes to getting things done, less is more. You need to focus on the essentials and reject the superfluous: fewer people in teams, fewer instructions, less paperwork, fewer hierarchies, fewer forecasts, and fewer meetings. You need to do only what is truly central and important to your business and do it well. Less thus becomes less change cost, less margin for error, less support needs, fewer useless explanations. Less means simplicity, clarity, and a job well done.

• Create agile organizations. This philosophy has to do with agile and transparent organizations; small, fast and flexible, open to change and innovation. Organizations with less paperwork, less mass, less fear and, in return, more flexibility, more changes and, definitely, more freedom.

• Avoid “Passion Killers”. Hire happy people, with passion for their profession. Look for good students: people who are curious and eager to learn. An average professional who is motivated and satisfied with what they do is preferable to a disgruntled and frustrated “guru”.

• Work through iterations. All decisions are temporary. You’ll come back to them again. So don’t stop: decide and move on. Don’t obsess over getting everything right the first time—it’s impossible. Take the pressure off. Let the project grow and speak to you, take shape, and evolve. As you progress through the iterative process, you’ll get to know the project and its circumstances better, and you’ll have input from your collaborators as well. This will allow you to make better-informed decisions. Don’t forget to celebrate the small successes that come with each interaction, and share the lessons learned.

• Maintain the deadline and the budget; adjust the scope. In the development of a project, we handle three fundamental variables: the deadline, the budget and the scope. In an environment like the current one, highly competitive and with accelerated changes, time is the key variable. The solution is to adjust the final scope of the project well. In other words, you have to establish the priorities well to carry out the fundamental part – the heart – respecting the deadline and the budget. Projects years ahead are nothing more than a pure fantasy, an entelechy that never takes shape as planned.

• Develop the “heart” of your idea first. Stick to the truly essential. Good ideas can be narrowed down; not-so-good ideas, on the other hand, are difficult to formulate. Follow the recommendations of “Getting Real”: take what you think the project should be and cut it in half. Keep cutting objectives to keep the basics. Break the result in half again: you already have the essentials. That’s the “heart” of your idea.

• Build small and agile teams. Metcalfe’s Law has a corollary that explains well the need for small teams: the efficiency of the team is inversely proportional to the square of the number of members. That is, the chances of communication problems increase exponentially when the number of members increases. A multidisciplinary team of only 3-5 people is the optimal format to develop a project in its initial phase.

• Avoid the temptation of growth. Not every company is destined to have thousands of employees, or reach a billion dollars in market capitalization. Some companies should consist of only 10 people, 5 people, or even just one. Finding the natural size of your company should be a triumph, not a capitulation. Conventional wisdom has assumed that companies must always be growing, and that they are dying. On many occasions, this dichotomy leads perfectly viable companies to an untimely and unnecessary death in the pursuit of continuous growth.

• Shorten the time, chop up the problems until you can digest them. Chop up the time available. Chop up the problems as well. Keep chopping up the deadlines until you get smaller pieces. Instead of a 12-week project, do 12 projects of 1 week: you will gain motivation and efficiency. Continue to break the problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you are able to digest them.

• Test your ideas in real conditions, with real customers and in real markets. Listen and improve. Always remember: you are developing a real project, so you have to test it in real conditions. Reflections in limbo, or laboratory tests, are useless. Test your service or product. Test with real users in real conditions. Don’t look for substitutes: they don’t exist. Work with real data. Get authentic feedback and, most importantly: make improvements based on the information you’ve obtained. You owe it to your users.
• Don’t let “legacy” annihilate your dream. Remember: the difficult thing is not to have new ideas; the really difficult thing is to get rid of old ideas, which are the ones that usually strangle innovation. I remember an occasion when I argued to a head of development that he was taking a long time to solve a seemingly simple but business-critical problem. He, after exhausting all kinds of apologies, imaginable and unimaginable, and seeing that he could not convince me, resorted to a phrase that I have not forgotten, and that I think is particularly valid when we are faced with profound changes in our organizations:
  

  “God created the world in seven days because he had no installed base.” That is, he was able to do so because he did not have to take into account the legacy of interests of a previous world. The message is clear: when the world to come is very different from the previous one, it is better to create from nothing.

It is obvious that many of these principles are only applicable when we talk about creating new organizations, Web 2.0 companies that operate globally with networked business models and products and services marketed through the Internet. It could not be otherwise, since, as I pointed out in the introduction, the “Getting Real” philosophy comes from the world of agile software development . But it is precisely these “digital native” organizations that best allow us to explore the new paradigms of Leadership 2.0 , and the ones that best expose the paradoxes of industrial organizations when responding to the challenges of the Age of Collaboration . You can watch the presentation

Make it happen. The smartest, fastest, and easiest way to build organizations 2.0 .

Attracting and retaining digital talent

In this scenario, making decisions will be a task in which the entire organization will have to participate. The new leader will be very different from the one we know. He will use social platforms of mass communication – Web 2.0 – to improve the effectiveness of organizations and to attract and retain digital talent. Only organizations that face the challenge of Leadership 2.0 will be able to obtain a competitive advantage sustained over time. The opportunities for growth are endless.

Transparency is key to the future of organizations

In the Age of Collaboration , transparency has ceased to be an abstract concept. It has found its physical embodiment in all the new forms of expression and mass collaboration that today make up Web 2.0. Beyond the countless newspapers in “.com” versions, blogs and wikis that comment every day on our social reality with total transparency, social networks have become true transparent virtual countries, populated by hundreds of millions of inhabitants. This is the case of Facebook or MySpace . With their mobile phones, their digital cameras, their email messages and their comments on blogs, these new countries have generated a veritable wave of transparency that is enormously useful. Much to their detractors, these social networks are accelerating the changes that our organizations need to meet the challenges of the Age of Collaboration.

We live in a world where trauma and triumph are instantly visible. In the words of Jonathan Schwartz : “Sunlight is not only a great disinfectant, but it is a wonderful safety net, because we cannot solve problems that we do not know about or that are hidden from us.” As we have already discussed, transparency in organizations is helping to create more flexible and efficient networked organizations.

The resistance is still many. The organizations we have built – both in the public and private spheres – are largely based on the opacity of their structures and the ignorance, on the part of their members, of the reality of the organization. Hence the pressing need to innovating in management , and to move towards more transparent and open organizations. To achieve this, we must design specific strategies that promote transparency and trust. In his book

“The Naked Corporation” , Don Tapscott and David Ticoll argue that, in the Age of Crowdsourcing, companies have to accept the fact that partners, workers, customers, the government, and the general public will have free access to all kinds of information about their organizations. It is clear that people are going to have much more information than in the past, and organizations must be prepared to take on this new situation, behaving and acting accordingly. Companies that try to limit access to information or ignore the forces of transparency are in danger of disappearing, unable to survive the new demands.

A quote from the book sums up the situation well: “In an age when networks put unprecedented amounts of information at everyone’s fingertips, companies have no choice but to reconsider their values and behaviors, and rethink the way they manage their information flows.”

Of course, there are still many obstacles in our organizations to achieve full transparency. It is true that some of them are valid, such as trade secrets or sensitive information about our customers. But the current crisis has shown that a large part of the financial services provided by entities that we thought were solvent were based on opacity and the lack of knowledge of customers regarding the real risks of the products offered. In the short term, it may be possible to survive by maintaining a certain degree of opacity that makes our product or business model seem viable; but in the long term, the truth ends up prevailing, and customers can always find a better alternative.

The digital revolution and the Internet are shredding at accelerated speed, and forever, the curtain that has always hidden the reality of organizations from public view. However, there are still few companies willing to accept and handle this new scrutiny. For most, transparency is a costly and disruptive element that threatens their survival.

Transparency is a new force that is unleashing, right now, profound changes in all areas; changes that will definitively affect the future viability of all organizations. This small revolution has revealed a crucial aspect: the validity of our value proposition as a company is “just a click away”. As never before, users now have all the information, and can issue their verdict instantly, with a single click. Blind trust and loyalty, as we have known them, no longer exist. Therefore, we have no choice but to reinforce and renew our company’s value proposition on a daily basis, almost at every moment.

We can all contribute to making transparency a differential value in our organizations. In fact, we will be doing so every time that, in our field, we improve the three basic components of cultural transparency in organizations:

• Active participation . Make transparency part of the organization’s culture, a value practiced at all levels. Transparency cannot succeed unless stakeholders know what they need to know and care about knowing it.

• Relevant information. Transparency requires making relevant information available to stakeholders – whether of a positive or negative nature – in an open and transparent manner, within legal bounds and in a truthful, accurate and balanced manner.

• Responsible transparency. We must deliver on our commitments to transparency by taking into account the interests of all affected parties, being upfront about deficiencies and challenges, and ensuring the integrity of the company’s operations.

By way of summary

1. In the new Era of Collaboration, organizations are going to face challenges that are simply outside the scope of traditional management competencies and their legacy. In a new environment that places the emphasis on collaboration and talent, the old hierarchies and structures of management are an impediment to creativity and innovation in our organizations, which must also adapt to changes at a speed they have never faced. For many companies, it will be increasingly difficult to stay ahead of the curve of change. In this environment, we must seek a balance between new emerging management practices and experimentation, to find novel and innovative management models; models that allow us to create the strategic competencies necessary in the new Era of Collaboration.

2. The hierarchical organizations we have created in the last century place the emphasis on labor and capital as the basis of value creation processes. And in doing so, not only do they fail to respond to the current needs of companies – collaboration and human capital management – but they have also created a model of employee participation that does not allow them to unleash their creativity. As if that were not enough, this model has generated a very high level of complexity that makes it impossible for organizations to respond adequately to market changes.

3. The idea that mobilizing human effort requires a legion of supervisors and bureaucrats is an anachronism that, like any “legacy,” refuses to disappear. The reality is that most “hierarchy” doesn’t add any value to organizations; Rather, it acts as a “passion killer”, preventing our employees from bringing their inner creativity and passion, and preventing their involvement and commitment in the work they do.

4. We need to create organizations capable of attracting and retaining new digital talent. Valuation and compensation that, instead of taking into account the value added to the organization and the contribution to results, is made based on the hierarchies, titles or privileges of the past, is simply another anachronism. The young people who arrive in companies today for the first time – the digital natives – have radically different values, motivations and expectations, and we must be able to offer them a new model of leadership if we want to attract and retain their talent.

5. Mass collaboration has a radical impact on the transparency of organizations . In a similar way to what has happened with the Internet in the markets – we have seen that it has created more efficient markets – transparency in organizations creates more flexible and efficient organizations. In many cases, the organizations we have created – both in the public and private spheres – are largely based on the opacity of their structures and the ignorance, on the part of their members, of the reality of the organization.

Where to start?

Leaving our “comfort zone” and starting to explore the realities of the new era can be a good starting point. Some of the keys we have already advanced in previous conversations: the Age of Collaboration , Leadership 2.0 , Digital Natives , Immigrant Bosses , Liquid Borders , etc. And others we will continue to explore in future conversations. We only need a little humility to recognize that, perhaps, the management practices that have given us so much success in the past are not necessarily going to serve us for the future. None of the suggestions I mention below require attending a new management course. All we have to do is open our minds and make our thinking patterns more flexible:

1. Start with your personal agenda . It’s very simple: if you don’t have a personal agenda, it’s highly likely that you’re part of someone else’s agenda. It’s about having your own vision for the leadership of the future, and establishing a personal action plan to transform yourself and introduce some new practice into your day-to-day life as a manager. Remember that “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always achieve what you’ve always achieved.”

2. Be an innovative leader. Create a culture that questions the status quo and addresses organizational challenges in an unusual way, looking for new ways to address them. Explore new avenues and avoid easy answers to the problem. Build a low-risk experimentation capability that allows you to launch new management innovation initiatives with a limited number of people and resources, so you can validate the level of commitment to potential changes. In other words: give new ideas a chance without crippling the organization’s ability to achieve its results on a day-to-day basis.

3. Learn the new language of collaboration with the same zeal with which you learned English back in the day to secure a future in any multinational. Digital natives have taken advantage of the collaboration platform – web 2.0 – to create innovative forms of communication that we, digital immigrants , are not yet familiar with. Overcome the Digital Immigrant Syndrome (Not Touched!) , actively participate in the blogs and social networks most relevant to your profession or sector and, when you consider that the time has come, publish your own and create your own brand (Personal Branding ) to make yourself known and establish your network of contacts.

4. It questions old ways of working that only made sense in the past and emerged to solve a problem that is no longer relevant to the organization. A frequent example of a management process of dubious value is the preparation of the annual budget of companies: it usually involves a huge waste of time and effort. Another clear example can be that of the endless operations meetings, in which it is not very clear what real value we are providing.

My invitation could not be more sincere. It is clear that the invention of modern management in the Industrial Age is one of the greatest achievements of the human race, and to this invention we owe, to a large extent, our material prosperity. But the time has come to “abandon the comfort” typical of organizations that are inflexible with people’s imagination, passion and creativity; the time has come to renegotiate some of the terms of our employment contract, and to reinvent ourselves as leaders and people. It is really important that we start building organizations now that are prepared to attract and develop the unique talent of the new generations of digital natives, in order to make the most of the enormous opportunities that the new Era of Collaboration brings with it, in all areas.