Workplace, Teams, & Culture P. 8

Companies are incurring enormous losses from the misappropriation of their trade secrets. In a 2002 survey of more than 130 firms, 40% reported actual or suspected losses, and the data suggest the true figure might be significantly higher. The study also estimated that the companies represented by the survey participants -- the Fortune 1000 corporations and 600 additional small and medium-sized companies -- were likely to have experienced trade-secret and other intellectual-property losses of more than $50 billion during a one-year period. Research has shown that the biggest threat to a company's trade secrets comes not from spying competitors but from within: current and former employees. Consequently, the protection of trade secrets is largely a managerial issue, and firms need to take the appropriate measures to ensure that employees keep trade secrets from leaking. But many organizations make a number of crucial missteps, sometimes failing to implement the right precautions or relying on a well-intentioned but ineffective practice -- or worse, a wrongheaded policy that only leads to more information being divulged. The following are the most common mistakes: giving short shrift to new-employee orientations, not communicating regularly with employees, signaling to employees that they aren't trusted, punishing instead of helping employees, not practicing what is preached, forgetting to clarify who owns ideas, defining the scope of trade secrets too narrowly and failing to address the subject of departing employees. By avoiding such mistakes, companies can help ensure that their trade secrets indeed stay secret.

The frequent failure of strategy might lie in its very definition.

Good communication is a prerequisite for good teamwork. But how much is enough?

The seeds of effective change must be planted by embedding procedural and behavioral changes in an organization long before the initiative is launched.

INTELLIGENCE: RESEARCH BRIEF: Vigilance is the key to avoiding potential organizational nightmares.

Forming close relationships with suppliers or customers is a popular business strategy, but such partnerships can develop problems. The authors observe that many close business relationships -- whether joint ventures or loose alliances -- fail. They describe a phenomenon they call the "dark side" of close relationships and maintain that close relationships that seem quite stable can, in fact, be vulnerable to decline and destruction. The authors draw both on their own surveys of business relationships and on other examples. The authors point out that the same factors that strengthen a partnership can also open the door to relationship problems. For example, when an automaker and a supplier built up personal relationships between employees at the two firms to facilitate their alliance and just-in-time manufacturing process, the trust and personal relationships also enabled the supplier more easily to cut corners in the production process. While observing that business relationships with problems can linger on for a surprisingly long time, the authors recommend strategies to prevent the "dark side" from taking over a business relationship. One such strategy is to ensure that both parties in the relationship make investments in it, in effect swapping "mutual hostages." If, however, damage to the relationship has already occurred, possible strategies include turning the crisis into an opportunity to improve the partnership, rotating in new personnel, reconfiguring the relationship or terminating it.

Throughout history, all business, innovation and even cognition have been based on localized cultural context. Pointing to the literature on the cultural antecedents of information and knowledge management (IKM), the authors make the argument that such cultural biases are the very spark of global innovation. They find it curious then that Western analytical assumptions currently dominate IKM research and development. Information and knowledge management models and frameworks that exclude the influence of national and regional culture have seriously undercut their potential effectiveness, particularly in global applications. If history is any guide, say the authors, these cultural influences must be encouraged if powerful new ideas for practical and theoretical IKM are to emerge.

Just as the Internet and the World Wide Web led to a huge change in how people interact with distant applications, so the Internet and Web services hold out the promise of drastically changing how distant applications interact with each other. But how real is this promise? If information systems could look for and find each other, share data and execute business processes, all with no (or very little) human involvement, the business world would likely be quite transformed. The author concludes, however, that Web services will not create this world, nor will any technology on the horizon. Web services, he argues, will be highly useful, but not quickly or obviously disruptive; in fact, they will reinforce existing relationships rather than catalyze new ones. What's more, the application-integration challenges that remain unaddressed by Web services are the really difficult ones that can only be overcome by the work of managers and leaders, not technologists or consortia. The author's themes are illustrated by an extended example drawn from his case study of IBM's EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) organization, which has been working with independent distributors in several countries to automate the ordering of midrange computing systems. The case provides a close look at an effort to go beyond the capabilities of previous B2B technologies to build agreements and standards for application-application interactions where none previously had existed.

Lack of communication among colleagues in the workplace is a widespread problem. Many companies struggle with the "silo syndrome" -- employees from different departments tend to keep to themselves, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities, particularly those that would arise from chance encounters among people who don't, but should, know each other. The author asserts that two parallel paradigm shifts are helping to change that. The first is a movement from desktop to mobile computing. The second is the move from individual to "social" software, here defined as programs that enable a group of people to accomplish common goals. Together, they say, the two trends have the potential to dramatically transform the ways in which companies conduct business. Toward that end, the author and his colleagues have developed a new technology that could help facilitate greater workplace collaboration. The technology, known as "Serendipity," is a yet to be commercialized mobile-phone application, intended to extend (rather than supplant) existing enterprise-communication and knowledge-management systems by untethering them from the desktop so that they can be used in social situations where they might be most beneficial: near the water cooler, in the hallway, around the coffee machine. Serendipity relies on Bluetooth, a low-power radiofrequency protocol designed primarily to enable wireless headsets or laptops to connect to mobile phones. A byproduct of that functionality, however, is that Bluetooth devices are aware of one another, which essentially turns them into short-range beacons, each with its own unique ID. In this article, the author explains how Serendipity works and discusses a number of the potential business applications that could arise from its ability to study, track and, perhaps most importantly, predict the dynamics of a social network. He also discusses some of the privacy issues and necessary safeguards -- such as opt-in methodologies -- that would have to be associated with such applications.