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Chris Grams Chris Grams

Community Guide at New Kind

Me in Three

I am the Community Guide for the MIX. One of my key tasks is looking for people who are passionate about reinventing management, both here on the MIX and elsewhere. If this is you, and you'd like to get more involved in the MIX effort, reach out to me and let me know!
I am also President and Partner at a company called New Kind. We started this company, after spending almost a decade helping build the open source technology company Red Hat, to figure out what would happen if you took the concepts that made the open source way a great way to build better software faster and used them in ANY company to build better ANYTHING faster.
Our company is named New Kind for a reason. When people ask us what we do, we embrace all the normal labels--strategy, design, branding, communications. But we'd call ourselves community catalysts, if we thought anyone would find that meaningful besides us. Actually we call ourselves that anyway. So there.

Blog Posts

Results from Sprint 1 of the Hack the MIX Hackathon

By Chris Grams on March 25, 2013

In February of this year we asked a group of MIXers who have made key contributions over the past few years to join us in our first ever Hack the MIX hackathon. Over the course of a month, we collaboratively developed a set of almost 100 ideas for how to make the MIX even better than it is today. As usual, we were amazed by the depth, breadth, cleverness, and sheer passion our community produced.

The Management 2.0 Hackathon: Using the inspiration of the web to hack management

By Chris Grams on June 17, 2012

It seems that every day on the Web we discover a new solution to a problem. Whether it’s a new online resource that helps us manage our finances or an online community that has organized to share information and address an issue, the Web is incredibly effective and offers endless inspiration.

And yet it seems that in our organizations, management is stuck in a state of 1.0—where bureaucratic command-and-control models make it hard for us to keep up with competition and the pace of change.

Why can’t management be as effective and inspiring as the Web? Or our organizations be as adaptive? 

Over the last seven months, Jonathan Opp and I have had a chance to address those questions firsthand with a team of volunteer hackers through the Management 2.0 Hackathon.

The Management 2.0 Hackathon was designed to deeply explore a simple idea: How can we apply the principles of the Web—which is already adaptable, innovative, and inspiring—and use them to reinvent management for the future?

Download the Management 2.0 Hackathon report now >>

The Management 2.0 Hackathon, a joint collaborative effort by...

Management 2.0 Hackathon: Innovative mini hacks from our contributors

By Chris Grams on February 23, 2012

As I mentioned in my previous post , over the past few months, more than 600 members of the MIX community from around the world have participated in the Management 2.0 Hackathon .

The hackathon is a hands-on, collaborative effort focused on generating fresh and practical answers to one of today's critical challenges: creating organizations that are fit for the 21st century. Our work is deeply inspired by the Web—one of the most adaptable, innovative, and inspiring things humans have ever created.

In our latest hackathon sprint, which ended a few days ago, the group generated more than 65 "mini hacks." A mini hack is essentially the beginnings of a hack like those that you see here on the MIX . Our goal for this sprint was to generate as many innovative hack ideas as we could quickly. Then we'd each review the full list of contributions and choose which of them we wanted to collaboratively develop into full, "shovel-ready" hacks that could be added to the MIX and eventually implemented within real organizations (if you'd like to learn more about what makes a great management hack, consider...

Hackathon update & navigator tool featuring organizations already using Management 2.0 principles

By Chris Grams on February 9, 2012

Over the past few months, I've been joined by 600+ members of the MIX community from around the world in the Management 2.0 Hackathon . The hackathon is a hands-on, collaborative effort focused on generating fresh and practical answers to one of today's critical challenges: creating organizations that are fit for the 21st century.

Our inspiration? The Web—one of the most adaptable, innovative, and inspiring things humans have ever created.

In Gary Hamel's introduction to the hackathon , he described the hackathon opportunity this way:

"Thanks to the Web, we can imagine organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering. Without doubt, we have cause to be hopeful. If we can find ways of transplanting the Internet’s DNA into our organizations—the interwoven values of transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, openness, community and self-determination—we may have the chance, at last, to overcome the design limits of Management 1.0. [In the Management 2.0 Hackathon], we are seeking to generate innovative ideas that illustrate how the principles and tools of...

Hackathon Pilot: Defining a Community of Passion by Alyson Huntington-Jones

By Chris Grams on April 29, 2011

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A few weeks ago, we kicked off the Hackathon Pilot, an experiment enabling passionate MIXers to collaboratively "write the chapter" on how to enable communities of passion within our organizations (learn more about the pilot here and here ). During Sprint #2, our pilot team was tasked with defining what a community of passion is and how exactly you might enable one. This is the third of three posts where pilot members synthesize the ideas from Sprint #2. Today's synthesis post comes from Alyson Huntington-Jones .
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Defining a Community of Passion
by Alyson Huntington-Jones

What is a community of passion and what does it mean to enable one? Defining an answer should be an easy enough exercise one may think, but the sheer diversity of ideas generated during the Hackathon Pilot Sprint #2 belies any such notion.

However, after much work, I arrived at the following definitions:

A community of passion is a unified group of individuals who regularly interact in a common area or location and share a strong liking, desire for or devotion to some activity, interest,...

Stories, Hacks, & Barriers

Groundbreaking ideas and practices from Chris Grams

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The Freedom / Accountability Swap

This hack begins the process of changing a Management 1.0 organization’s culture by recognizing that an increase in personal freedom must be accompanied by an increase in personal

Hack by Chris Grams on April 30, 2012

Co-Authored By Susanne Ramharter, Laurence Lock Lee, Josh Allan Dykstra, Aaron Anderson

5Comments

Don’t Just Flatten the Organization, Make Everyone Accountable for Flattening Time-Sucking Bureaucratic Systems

Life in a large organization can often feel like a few moments of inspiration and innovation surrounded by a lifetime of sitting on conference calls, filling out forms, and creating PowerPoint decks t

Hack by Chris Grams on June 21, 2011

Co-Authored By Sam Knuth (Folk-Williams), Rebecca Fernandez

bureaucracy

time-sucking systems

accountability

Management

Strategic Planning the Wikimedia Way: Bottom-Up and Outside-In

In 2010, the Wikimedia Foundation, a small non-profit supporting Wikipedia and related projects, turned the conventional approach to setting strategy on its head.

Story by Chris Grams on May 20, 2011

Co-Authored By Philippe Beaudette, Eugene Eric Kim

activism and advocacy

trust

management 2.0

company culture

setting strategy and direction

strategy

media and telecommunications

6Comments

Think like a conductor to achieve better organizational alignment

Ah, the beauty of a small organization. Everyone knows what you are trying to accomplish, and if anyone doesn't, they know who to ask.

Hack by Chris Grams on August 27, 2010

internal communications

organizational alignment

5Comments

Want more engaged employees? Default to open.

In my ten years at Red Hat (the open source software pioneer), we had a very simple little cultural trick we used everywhere we could:We defaulted to open.What does this mean?

Hack by Chris Grams on August 5, 2010

When considering community engagement strategies, stop thinking like Tom Sawyer

Terms like "open innovation" and "customer-driven innovation" are all the rage and these strategies can certainly help organizations become more innovative.

Hack by Chris Grams on July 28, 2010

customer-driven innovation

community-building

1Comments

Avoid shark-infested waters to survive meeting hell in an entrenched bureaucracy

Most people avoid swimming in shark-infested waters. Why? Because that’s where sharks have the upper hand.

Hack by Chris Grams on July 13, 2010

coordinating activities

operations

Co-authored Contributions

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Unclog your pipes with the Autonomy Reality Check

You say your employees have autonomy, then why is everything so difficult, why are they frustrated and why do change efforts seem to fizzle away? Find out how culture and grey areas are block

Hack by Susanne Ramharter on April 30, 2012

Co-Authored By Chris Grams

Using "Traditionally Virtual" organizational structure

A “Traditionally Virtual” infrastructure rethinks the advantages and disadvantages of virtual and traditional work designs. As a result, it better supports worker autonomy while maintainin

Hack by Vlatka Hlupic on April 26, 2012

Co-Authored By Jack Bergstrand, Chris Grams, Stefan Blobelt, Gianvittorio Zandona, Michael Grove

3Comments

Why points trump the hierarchy to reward contribution in knowledge organizations

Hierarchy can be reinvented through a contribution-based “points system,” linked specifically to how each employee impacts the company’s results.

Hack by Vlatka Hlupic on April 26, 2012

Co-Authored By Jack Bergstrand, Madhusudan Rao, Stefan Blobelt, Chris Grams

7Comments

Systemic/Holistic Management: Connecting the Dots with Project Monitoring 2.0

Project Monitoring 2.0 is a collaborative systemic monitoring approach for project management to bring the “people” part of project activity into focus to get earlier insight into problems.

Hack by Vlatka Hlupic on April 26, 2012

Co-Authored By Stefan Blobelt, Matt Johnson, Chris Grams

2Comments

Leading by letting go

Leading by letting go addresses a fundamental mismatch of traditional vertical leadership approaches with the needs of knowledge workers who tend to ignore corporate hierarchy and need autonomy to unl

Hack by Vlatka Hlupic on April 26, 2012

Co-Authored By Stefan Blobelt, Chris Grams, Robin Deacle, Michael Grove, Antonio Galvan Luna

0Comments

Advancing Autonomy A Step At A Time

Work toward a team of employees who develop their own goals and objectives that are in-line with corporate goals and based on their passions, likes, interests and job.

Hack by Robin Deacle on April 24, 2012