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Are you afraid of speaking up at work? That is the topic of ongoing research reported in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Quoting from their research paper (abstract here) Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School and James Detert from Penn State, the two researchers, made some interesting observations in this email interview.

While there are individual and contextual reasons why some people speak up more readily than others, the main reason why people do not speak up is “fear” - something that we inherited from our earliest ancestors. As the researchers point out: ” it seems we’re all hard-wired to overestimate rather than underestimate certain types of risk—it was better (for survival) to “flee” too often from threats that weren’t really there than to not flee the one time there was a significant risk. So, we’ve inherited emotional and cognitive mechanisms that motivate us to avoid perceived risks to our psychological and material well-being…Thus, fear of offending those above us is both natural and widespread.”

The interview talks about some ways to change a company culture so that people speak up more frequently. The reality is that changing a culture of hard-wired fear is very difficult. Add to that the fact that change hurts and it may be impossible to really change a company culture without also changing the fundamental hierarchical nature of companies.

[Tags: fear company culture hr change]

The most recent Harvard Business Review reports on a study (requires subscription) that was done on the impact of customer communities on customer behavior at eBay in Germany (disclosure - I have an active interest in this topic as I have agreed to chair a conference on the business of communities - Community 2.0 - but more on that later).

The numbers are quite interesting. The experiment involved 140,120 eBay customers who had bought or sold on eBay but who had not participated in the eBay customer communities before. 79.242 were invited to join the online customer community, while the remaining 60,878 were used as a control group. Of the people who were asked to join the community, 3,299 became active participants and 11,242 became lurkers. Over the course of a year they compared the behavior of the active participants and lurkers to that of the control group and found that:

• Lurkers and active participants won up to 25% more auctions
• Lurkers and participants paid prices that were as much as 24% higher
• Lurkers and participants spent up to 54% more money in total
• Active participants listed up to 4 times as many items
• Active participants earned up up 6 times as much monthly sales revenue
• For first time sellers who were lurkers and participants, 10 times as many of them started selling on eBay after joining the community

All in all the activities of the lurkers and participants resulted in 56% more sales during the year of the study - bringing in millions of additional dollars into eBay’s bottom line.

So can the results of this experiment be replicated in more traditional businesses?

Some people clearly think so, while others who used to be very enthusiastic about the business of communities are starting to become very skeptical.

Communities require a certain critical mass to get going - and not all companies have a large enough customer base to get to that point. They also require a lot more work and resources than most companies are willing to invest - to set up the infrastructure, to nurture the communities, to acquire content, etc.

Active communities of employees, customers and partners are clearly powerful management instruments that can dramatically improve core business processes like innovation, product development and marketing & sales. They can also backfire and have very negative impact if they are not managed properly, or set up wrongly. Before embarking on this path, companies have to truly understand the dynamics as well as the pros and cons of communities. They also need to find out if they have the resources and wherewithal to create their own communities or whether they should play in someone else’s sandbox.

Unfortunately, many will start the process by throwing technology at the problem - let’s just hope that those ignorants won’t destroy the market for the rest of us like email spammers destroyed email marketing and (un)ethical zealots are slowly destroying word of mouth marketing.

[Tags: community management customer community community marketing wom word of mouth marketing]

Right on the heels of Al Gore’s fabulous “An Inconvenient Truth” movie on global warming, another documentary is scheduled to hit theaters in the next few weeks - Great Warming. This one is sponsored by various corporations who position themselves as “green” marketers. As part of the whole effort they also developed a free booklet on climate change for 13 year old kids which seems like a great little book.

If only they could distribute that in classrooms it would help reach parents through the kids.

Randy Antik told the moving story of how he was instrumental in the founding of All Kinds Of Minds with Dr. Mel Levine last week at the Businness Innovation Factory’s 2nd annual Collaborative Innovation conference.

Every year thousands of kids, who often times are not less intelligent, but more intelligent than average, suffer unnecessarily in the traditional learning environments as they learn differently. All Kinds of Minds is a non-profit Institute “that helps students who struggle with learning measurably improve their success in school and life by providing programs that integrate educational, scientific, and clinical expertise.” They achieve this by educating K-12 teachers about the science of learning and on how to provide a good learning environment for all students. So far the organization has trained over 30,000 teachers and they estimate that more than three-quarter-of-a-million kids have benefited from their program! One of the biggest coup for the organization came when Mayor Bloomberg announced that all NYC teachers would go through the program.

It is great to see how ordinary people with a passion can get involved and achieve success in providing for a good future for our kids - but where is our government in all of this? Other than trying to bring more faith into the classroom, or to try to confuse our kids about what constitutes science versus dogma…which of course we all know they are doing a good job at!

[Tags: all kind of minds education bif business innovation factory]

Rhode Island congressman Jim Langevin opened the second day of the Business Innovation Factory’s Collaborative Innovation conference yesterday with the announcement that the Business Innovation Factory, a non profit sponsored by the Governor’s office, in partnership with Dean Kamen’s FIRST Challenge, will now bring a robotics program to every high school in Rhode Island.

Through a series of robotics competitions, Dean Kamen’s FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) project brings together industry partners and schools to stimulate kids and instill in them a love for everything that is science and engineering related. Born out of the realization that we are losing our future competitive edge by not educating enough scientists and engineers, the program has been found to have a dramatic impact on science and engineering education. In fact, a study conducted by Brandeis University found that 59% of FIRST participants want to pursue careers in science and engineering. Not only that, the same study found that there is a 50% higher likelihood that students who participated in the FIRST program will go to college! FIRST participants are also 10X as likely to take on internships during their college Freshman year, and they are more than twice as likely to pursue a science and technology career.

This demonstrates how industry and government can team up together to truly deliver transformational projects in the area of education. Hopefully many other states will follow suit!

[Tags: innovation education bif business innovation factory]