Cristóbal Conde on The Social Business

Although he never uses the term, Cristobal Conde really understands the nature of the social business, starting with the individual, the use of social tools, and the new role of management:

This interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Dan Neville/The New York Times

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

Q. Why did that shift occur?

A. I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Q. How long have you used it?

A.
About seven months. By having technologies that allow people to see
what others are doing, share information, collaborate, brag about their
successes — that is what flattens the organization. I think the role of
the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed
to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of
the show, rather than being the lead.

I think too many bosses
think that their job is to be the lead, and I don’t. By creating an
atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get
a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people
they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

Q. What kind of things do you write on Yammer?

A.
I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see
more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what
are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are
their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now,
what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a
broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a
long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too
formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it
takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because
I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the
C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think
about them.”

via www.nytimes.com

This is a must read piece for anyone wondering about the benefits of social tools, and the impact that a tuned-in senior executive can have on a organization.

Conde paints an unflattering portrait of himself as having been an autocratic workaholic, but he realized that no matter how smart he was he couldn’t make every decision in a business with more than a few hundred employees. It wouldn’t scale. But he thought it through and moved to a much more decentralized organization with very high levels of autonomy, which I feel is one of the defining characteristics of a social business (see Defining Social Business).