Hack:
Business at the Speed of Now: Every Opportunity, Every Employee, Every Time

Line up five people and whisper in succession a complex set of instructions. What the fifth person hears and does will have little resemblance to what the first person intended. Imagine if the fifth person has a question and the process is reversed. Welcome to the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of Management 1.0.

This silly children’s game actually takes place all the time in the Old Management System, where hierarchy rules. A customer presents a problem, the problem travels up the chain of command, a question comes back down, the answer slogs its way back up the chain, and a distorted decision finally creeps back to the point of customer contact. As a recent Consumer Reports survey indicates, two-thirds of customers suffering through such an aggravating problem-solving approach will have bolted out the door or slammed down the phone. That puts a smile on the face of the more nimble competitor who easily snags the angry customer’s business.

Today, customers (defined as anyone inside or outside the company who receive work from others) want the right solutions to the right problems, and they want them NOW. Web 2.0 has enabled that expectation setting a standard where YES is the only viable value proposition and NOW is the only acceptable timeframe. Making that happen requires a Now Management System, one that enables every employee to jump on every opportunity every time.

With the Grand Canyon gap between what the leaders envision and what employees must be capable of delivering in real time, management must be reengineered. Management’s purpose is to make sure that EVERYTHING is in place before the NOW Moment arrives -- that's the definition of Management 2.0.  In a Now Management System, leaders ensure that the company’s mission, vision, values, goals, and strategies thrive in the minds of everyone who works for the company, especially those on the frontlines who create the most value.

Now Management demands transparency, accountability, quick access to data and knowledge, and all the appropriate skills and tools that install instant decision making at the point of action. While leaders have often dreamed of building organizations capable of doing that, Web 2.0 makes it possible. In particular, social media (both internal and external) and cloud computing help create the affordable, instantaneous multi-directional flow of knowledge employees need to seize every opportunity every time.

The Near Future

Brandy, two years out of engineering school and a new recruit at software developer BEARPAWsoft, has just arrived at her Silicon Valley cube for a one-week stint on the graveyard shift as a technical support specialist. She’s volunteered for this assignment because she’s eager to see what happens on the frontlines with customers she would otherwise never meet.

Grabbing her Red Bull, she logs into NOWinside℠, the game-changing management system her company has installed designed to satisfy customers at the speed of now.

                                                                                                                                                                                                               Brandy barely settles in when her Skype rings. Onto the screen pops the clearly irate face of Amos O’Shea, the Chief Information Officer of TexTech, the huge account in Ireland that BEARPAW won just last week.  

“Six of our production facilities are down,” bellows the CIO,” because your damned software crashed! We need this fixed, and we need it fixed NOW!” Brandy’s heart races. She knows that her actions during the next few minutes will determine whether the CIO decides to stick with the new software or dump it.

“I’ll get back to you in ten minutes,” Brandy promises.

Immediately she sends an internal distress tweet to the software team in Vietnam. In less than a minute she’s on Skype as the engineers in Saigon see Brandy’s tweet and start accessing relevant documents and data from the cloud. Their real-time conversation includes “tag” searches of blogs, video references, and other critical documents. The inference engine suggests the “best-fit” materials to review. They quickly spot the problem, a recently discovered bug that application maintenance team in Paris had fixed and validated hours earlier. The engineers immediately make the necessary change in their cloud application.

When Brandy Skypes the CIO, Amos has not only calmed down, he’s thrilled with the swift response. “I didn’t think you guys could solve the problem this fast. You’re amazing!”

As Brandy finishes the call with the customer, she picks up her Red Bull. “Still cold,” she marvels.  Her smart phone chimes with a text from her boss.

“Checking in. Everything OK?” 

“No prob,” she texts back.

……………….

Brandy thrives in the business world with the very tools she uses and loves in her personal life. Possessing the New Millennial mindset, she loves working in a company where the NOWinside℠ affords her access to “instant everything.”