The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work by Cathleen Benko & Molly Anderson

Author:Cathleen Benko & Molly Anderson [BENKO, CATHLEEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781422155165
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Published: 2010-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

ADVANCING LATTICE WAYS OF PARTICIPATING

Ways to participate are constantly emerging and changing, but a number of leading organizations are learning important lessons along the way. Here are some of the most salient.

Let Many Experiments Bloom

Intuit cofounder and Executive Committee chairman Scott Cook has coined the term user-contribution systems to describe the new forms of mass participation we have explored in this chapter.33 The systems allow customers, employees, and sales prospects—or even people with no previous connection to a company—to actively or passively contribute work, expertise, information, or behavioral data to a site that aggregates and automatically converts it into something useful to others, with little or no intervention by an organization.

Intuit learned important lessons from its own efforts to deploy user-contribution systems for mass participation. The Silicon Valley firm, which has eighty-two hundred employees and $3.1 billion in revenues, provides financial software and Web services to consumers, small- to mid-size businesses, financial institutions, and accounting professionals. As Cook readily admits, the notion that people were willing to help his company create value for customers and shareholders for free struck him as “unfathomable.”

Intuit began with a small-scale experiment, creating the free TaxAlmanac forum and wiki, where tax preparers can raise (and answer) often obscure questions. More than 400,000 tax professionals flooded the online space to contribute questions and answers for the benefit of other tax preparers in the Intuit community. The site also has served as an excellent opportunity for Intuit to acquire new customers at little cost.

“It’s about getting out of the conference rooms and actively experimenting,” says Cook. He recommends that companies model many small experiments and then get rapid feedback from customers, employees, and stakeholders.34 Noting that CEOs sometimes fail to properly predict the impact of new products, Cook says that the role of a leader is not to make every decision about the company’s future but instead to create a “culture of experimentation” wherein customers’ votes on small experiments are used to figure out what works.35

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