I recently wrote a post about EMC's Innovation Conference last October. The centerpiece of the event was an Innovation Contest. It was smart fun with global talent.
Different speakers were invited to the event. Customers came in and spoke about storage innovation in their own companies. Several universities came in and spoke about their research. Don Tapscott came in and described many of the concepts from his book Wikinomics.
Then an EMC VP stood up to address the innovators.
His name was Chuck Hollis.
I had never heard of him. Honestly.
Social Media Pitch
Chuck was there, of course, to encourage the innovators to become involved with social media. He announced that there was a new platform internal to EMC where employees could experience social media firsthand. He gave anecdotal evidence about the value of social media. He talked about blogs, discussion forums, and communities. And then he took some questions.
I knew he was going to get some real zingers from the crowd. And he did.
Do you really think my manager is going to let me spend time blogging?
Chuck answered the question with his usual head-on bluntness. And his answer had us laughing in our seats. It's five months later and I'm still chuckling. Here's what he said:
What your manager tells you is only one form of input.
Only At EMC
Think about your place of employment. This type of comment would usually be followed up with: "No really I'm just kidding, sit down with your manager and use the following argument.....".
But not here. Chuck didn't back down from the statement. That doesn't change the fact that the statement was controversial. But it was made by a very high-ranking member of the EMC Executive Team. Now I'm one of those people who watches the EMC Executive Team like day traders watch the stock market. So I rolled his statement around my head for a while.
And then it dawned on me what his statement really was.
It was a challenge.
Reading the Executive Tea Leaves
This is my ninth year at EMC. There's a culture of challenge. But it's very subtle.
Take the Innovation Conference. I watched the "innovation movement" become more prevalent in EMC last year. It was driven by the executives. And they presented an opportunity to every employee in EMC to submit an innovation idea. But everyone is buried with work. It's not easy to take the time to formulate an idea, review it, and submit an abstract. But I did.
It benefited my company. And I was rewarded.
So when Chuck made his statement, I eventually figured out what it was. It was a challenge to put in a little extra work to benefit EMC.
And somewhere down the line, there's a reward.
The Problem
Let's return to the original question: "Do you really think my manager is going to let me?". My hunch is that this question was asked by somebody that's fairly new to EMC. My experience with EMC culture is that most managers would answer the question the exact same way: "Sure. Just Get Your Job Done".
Getting the job done is certainly part of the DNA of EMC. Micro-management is not. The assumption here is that (in my case) building products is job #1. Make sure that building products doesn't suffer, and then knock yourself out if you want to do something extra.
So I didn't even ask my manager. I knew what he would say. I just started blogging. So did large numbers of other people. EMC has already started to reap the benefits both internally and externally. And so have I.
Fear Of Blogging
I've heard it said by new employees that there is no way they'd join the blogging experiment. This is due to the fact that at their former companies, blogging meant "you're playing on the internet instead of working". I've even heard stories of blogrolls being used as input for layoffs.
But that's not true here. How do I know?
By reading the tea leaves....
Steve
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