Let’s say you want to figure out what to do on the weekend. If you don’t already have a set of options to choose from you will probably look up your friend, you know the one, that friend that just seems to always know where to find some action. They’ll likely end up linking you up with several other friends and before you know it you’re out having a ball.

Every network has a hub and that can mean either a person or a place. Hubs aren’t usually the coolest person or place that you know, instead hubs are (almost by definition) the most connected and often the most inviting people or places.

In order to be a hub you have to be open to accepting diverse connections. You have to see how those individual connections interweave like connecting social dots. A hub is almost always a generalist of sorts; the hub doesn’t get too bogged down in details because the hub is always looking for opportunities to connect those dots that will produce the important details.

By making these connections the hub can create it’s own power of influence. Some people and places are all about being specialists; that is how they earn their social power. An office building specializes in providing office space and derives its power from the perception that it is about serious business. A nuclear scientist derives their social power from the perception that they know a great deal about nuclear processes. But do those things have to be specialists to succeed? Do they actually have to rely on those skills to have influence and create brilliant new possibilities?

No. Of course not. What if that nuclear scientist is the one who knows how to network two other, more brilliant scientists together (maybe they aren’t even both in the same field); and perhaps that nuclear scientist knows of investors who want to bring the resulting brilliant idea to market.

Power of influence is only limited by the sphere of connections we open ourselves up to. So what role fits for you? Are you a hub or a specialist; or, are you finding a way to be both?

Interested in learning how to become a connector in the online social world? Contact Andrew Miller Consulting today for a free brainstorming session.

Recently I’ve been talking with people about organizational changes and how the implementation of them is often done in one of two ways.

1. Change done to you or,
2. change that you are a part of implementing.

In life we all know that change occurs that, as individuals, we feel is being forced upon us; that feeling of something being done to us. This may be something such as a lover breaking the romance off or a boss giving you a pink slip. Needless to say, having change “done to you” doesn’t usually feel good.

Organizational Health

When we think about communities and organizations we generally think in terms of the organizational “health”. What does a healthy organization look like? Every organization will have their own checklist but a couple pretty standard ones that I can think of are that they:

• are producing enough output to maintain or expand the organization;
• are maintaining an environment that fosters good morale; and,
• are innovative and create a vibrancy.

The Death of Morale

One sure way to kill innovation, vibrancy and eventually production is to kill morale. When your organizations chooses to operate using a process of “doing to” instead of “doing with” you run a very high risk of killing morale. In the short-run you will realize the change you hoped to implement but consider the costs associated with killing morale.

• Employee turnover = organizational knowledge deficit.
• Employee silence = workers will no longer feel that their opinion matters and will stop providing innovative ideas; instead they’ll look for outside opportunities to share those ideas.
• Employee revolt = consider all of the opportunities employees now have to express their opinion about thier personal lives (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Can your organization overcome 10-100-1000 employees spreading the word-of-mouth opinion that your organization is broken? Imagine each one of those employees has an average of 150 friends that might not just read that message but re-link it?

Changing Together

So how do you avoid the “doing to” type of change? There’s no single answer but here’s the general idea.

• Include everyone in the path of the possible change an opportunity to share their knowledge with the work group that is ultimately tasked with making the decision.
• Use technology to provide those people with a chance to follow the decision process as closely as they choose.
• Clearly show how their concerns are being addressed (either with a bulletproof explanation about why something can’t be done or an acknowledgement that a change came about due to a specific person or groups suggestion).
• Never assume that a person within the organization knows about a change that is coming; be explicit with announcements and be overly inclusive in your change initiatives.

Remember, the change you do to someone else is an open invitation to changes your organization might not be able to afford.

Do you need help managing change? Contact Andrew Miller Consulting today.

Is your change management leadership more like automobile drivers or motorcycle riders?

I’m not trying to ascertain whether or not they live life on the edge, have a bad-boy image or anything like that; I’m more interested in your leaderships focus and flexibility.

Physics and Change Leadership

I have been an automobile and motorcycle enthusiast my whole life. I really like machines and tinkering with them and particularly machines that will propel me somewhere. For this reason I’ve had plenty of opportunities to push cars and cycles to their limits, and to my own limits. Here though we don’t need to focus on pushing those limits. In fact I want to focus on the most important, most risky and most frequent examples.

The daily drive in traffic, on your most familiar streets.

If you are familiar with driving a car (or taking public transportation) for going about your daily routine you know that there isn’t much required of you. You have to make it to the bus stop on time, or you have to make sure that your car is properly warmed up before you head out.

During those colder months many automobile drivers won’t even fully clean off their windows because they are so confident that they don’t need that level of clarity to safely navigate between their familiar destinations.

A motorcyclist however must be a constant master of risk mitigation and change management. A short list of variables that change daily, no matter how familiar a motorcyclists path, are:

• Weather – Heat, Cold, Sun Glare, Rain, Sleet, Snow, Ice and Wind. Every one of these weather elements effect how the rider reacts, the information they are receiving from their nervous system. It also effects how the machine acts and reacts – motorcycle components are much more exposed than automobile parts and this plays a role in what your bike is able (or unable) to do at any given time.
• Road Conditions – Potholes, Oil, Debris. Many obstacles on the roadway could damage a car but rarely in such a way that it is disastrous to the operator – this is not the case for motorcyclists.
• Driver Awareness – Eating, Cell Phones, Stereo Adjustment, GPS. Look around for a moment at what drivers are up to during their commute and you’ll get a good feel for why motorcyclists can never let their guard down.

All of these factors play a part on a daily basis. When turning a motorcycle you have to physically adjust your body position, appropriately use your brakes and speed to maintain proper tire traction or else you’ll end up on the slab. In a car you worry about braking and speed but, for everyday driving, you are making that happen with the shifting of a single foot.

Day to Day Change Leadership

Is your organization’s leadership comfortable with waiting for those surprise moments where they may or may not have time to disengage their auto-pilot and react to change? Is your leadership treating the organization more like an automobile that doesn’t need much attention? When this approach is taken where is your leadership’s focus on a day-to-day basis?

What if your leadership worked day-to-day like a motorcyclist? Focused, balanced and being aware of the daily changes that are occurring around them; looking for opportunity in those changes? What if they paid attention to the organization like a motorcyclist has to pay attention to their bike; knowing that any under-performing group changes the dynamics of the whole organization?

Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. — Hugh Laurie