Author: carlosmorley

At CollabSystem, success is our obsession. We don’t waste our time on real world success. That is beyond our reach. We focus on the success described in self-help listicles. We wanted to share what we have learned in our obsessive pursuit of success.

Here is our list of the five things you need to give up for success:

1. Hope: Success is like hell. You have to give up all hope of escaping from its clutches. Embrace the torment because the pressure to succeed is everywhere around you. Success doesn’t allow for human emotion so give up hope now. If you surrender hope, then everything is upside.
2. Sanity: Nobody who wants to succeed for success’ sake is sane. So admit that early and save the pretence. A strong dose of irrationality will do wonders for your pursuit of success. If you can become a fully fledged narcissist or psychopath, your success is nearly guaranteed.
3. Human Relationships: Who needs others? Seriously. Who does? The hollowed accolades of success are surely enough (editor: Did you confuse hollowed & hallowed again?). Success is always measured at the expense of others. You will need to sacrifice others to succeed, so it’s better not to value them from the start.
4. Spontaneity: Successful people wear uniforms, wake at 5am, follow strict routines, read for 5 hours a week and are disciplined. If success sounds like prison, that’s just its lack of spontaneity. Successful people never react, learn or act on a whim.
5. Soul: We are not literally going to take your soul at a crossroad (though we hear good things about that path to success especially in music). You are just going to shed it as an useless appendage, like an appendix, as you ruthlessly fight your way to the top free from ethics, qualms or any thought for the future beyond success (For a minute, forget that the appendix has a role in the immune system). If you still had your soul, how could success feel so appropriately empty?

Give up these five simple things today and you can start your success journey. Otherwise just give up and enjoy life.

Why have money lying around when it can be flowing in your social networks?

The founders of CollabSystem had one of our bi-weekly strategy sessions recently. Late into the night we realised something extraordinary. We are rich. We can make you rich too. We can get even richer making you richer. If that isn’t a start-up minimum value proposition, what is?

Social Expectations of Value

When you think about it our traditional stores of value are pretty arbitrary.  Who says lumps of gold are worth even their production costs? It is not like the stuff is in short supply on this planet. If we didn’t dig it out of the ground to store it away as a store of value, it would be largely worthless. The value is in the social expectation of value.

Through history we have attributed value in trade to all kinds of weird and wonderful things: tulips, shells, livestock, company stock, start-up options, and more. The value in each case is not inherent in the object. The value is in the social expectation of value.

Fiat currency is similar. We accept pieces of paper and digital records as reward for our work and in exchange for our goods because we think they are valuable. When fiat currency began it had to be backed by gold (See above). Now it is backed by nothing other than government promises of value.  Our belief in these promises is just a social expectation of value.

The ultimate proof of this proposition is cryptocurrency. We value cryptocurrencies because other people value cryptocurrencies. They are the ‘greater fool’ theory brought to life on a fancy blockchain ledger.  Even dogecoin the parody cryptocurrency is worth billions. We at CollabSystem are very jealous of any rich parody founders.

Converting Social Capital to Value

If social expectations of value is the foundation of value, then to get rich we need to hack these foundations. At CollabSystems, hacking the foundations of something critical is our bread and butter.

CollabSystems is beginning a big development project today to convert social capital to value. The Kardashians may have proven you can get rich by acting rich and being followed by a lot of people. CollabSystem wants to extend the value of social capital to everyone.

No longer will conference organisers promising to pay you with exposure leave you hungry. No longer will your boss and colleagues empty words of recognition leave you with the power cut off. No longer will the hours of thought leadership on social media be such a complete wasteful time suck.

CollabSystem is declaring today that Social Capital has value. Social capital is the ultimate social expectation of value. You are rich, powerful and influential because other people think you are. Now we just need to convince the rest of you to believe it. We think this should be easy. If you do start to value social capital, you will be rich.

PS If you would like more Social Capital, we are happy to give you some in exchange for any hard goods, fiat currency or gold (Cryptocurrencies excluded).

Many of our clients have complained that our original collaboration model was too liberal and posed unacceptable risks of effective collaboration in their organisation. We are still struggling to work out how they identified that.

However since the launch of Vault, CollabSystem is the global leader in high security collaboration platforms. As a result we have updated our collaboration model to reflect client demands.

The new model focuses on the core demands of effective collaboration platforms for senior executives, corporate comms, HR and IT Security. Based around four simple verbs, this model delivers risk free effective collaboration for any organisation. The phases of the model are:

• Monitor: it is essential that every single conversation and action on the network is reviewed for risk. Data must be captured on all platform activity. Monitoring is the basis for effective punishment and deterrence. Importantly heavy monitoring will enable the creation of creepy compliance oriented gamification.
• Delete: the next phase after Monitoring is Deletion. As a network matured and conversation volumes increase, it is important to maintain a chilling volume of message deletion. In addition to deleting any messages containing blacklisted words, banned topics, reference to business information, client details, competitive intelligence, IP, documents, gossip, negative tone, comments about executives, strategy or major change initiatives, we recommend deletion of random messages as a reminder of the power of compliance.
• Exclude: the next phase of maturity is to begin to boot users who have violated the policies had excessive number of messages deleted or who seem to be enjoying collaboration too much. Get them off the network and back to work.
• Deny: the final maturity phase is Denial. Not every network comes with Vault’s level of security. However we recommend a complex 4-factor identification model as the final phase of platform maturity. At this point, when your users will have beaten the restrictions and still are collaborating effectively you can deny them access to the platform with a complex security requirement that nobody can satisfy.

The power of this heavy handed model of collaboration is that it helps set a strategy for collaboration in your organisation and also guides your teams on what to do with your collaboration network. Also this highly restrictive approach means people will likely not use your system, enabling you to save costs in the long run. With the CollabSystem Enterprise Collaboration Model you can be sure your employees will be effectively collaborating on a WhatsApp chat group somewhere beyond your control.

The modern digital workplace is a place of risks, fear and crime. Every day malicious hackers, lazy employees and negligent executives are stealing your data, your money, your time and your stationery. As a responsible global technology vendor, CollabSystem is determined to address the vibrant criminal enterprises threatening the future of your digital workplace and the lifeblood of your organisation. To adresss these fearful threats, CollabSystem are pleased to announce Vault, the perfectly secure digital workplace.

Vault is the first perfectly secure digital workplace. CollabSystem can assure the safety of Vault because it is entirely free of human users. Instead of weak human passwords, Vault is secured by 12-inch thick steel doors. No need to worry about hackers, Vault is completely isolated from the internet by an air gap of 12 feet, 12 inches of steel, a metre of reinforced concrete and a kilometre of bedrock. Vault does not rely on fragile two-factor authentication, instead there is simply no access. After setup of your Vault, we destroy the keys, seal the locks and erase all trace that Vault was ever created. With Vault you will never need worry about a loss of data or productivity in your digital workplace. Despite the intense security and prevention of user access, our data shows Vault user adoption is indistinguishable from average digital workplace adoption.

Surveillance

For the truly paranoid, Vault is also available with a total surveillance module. Vault’s Surveillance module uses sophisticated AI, complicated camera arrays and Facebook quiz to monitor your employees frustration as they totally fail to access Vault. You will have terabytes of video and other data that you will never examine that confirms that no criminal and nobody else ever access your digital workplace illegally or in any other way.

At Any Cost

We know security matters a lot. That’s why we charge a lot. Like other high end security systems, we know once we have you afraid then price is no object. We’d hate to underquote your safety.

Our price is so high we can’t say it out loud. We print it on a fine card stock in gothic font. Call us for an appointment for a confidential quote.

John is foreman material. He decided to stand in front of Jane who we were trying to photograph.

Many senior executives have unique needs in a collaboration. CollabSystem is proud to announce its new toolsuite, Executive, all the tools that a modern executive needs to survive in a modern enterprise social network.

Taking the Executive out of Executive Collaboration

Executive has been developed as a result of extensive consultation with senior executives. Actually, they couldn’t make any time to discuss their needs in collaboration but we did get to talk to their assistants a lot trying to set up a meeting. We based our design on conversations with people from HR, Technology and Employee communications who pretended they knew what senior executives need.

Our goal in launching Executive was to ensure that executives could participation in collaboration solutions with minimum inconvenience and to achieve maximum value. We also wanted to support community managers struggling to get executives engaged with a new set of tools to lower the bar on executive participation. We don’t think we could have got the bar lower without digging.

Our design goal is simple. We take the executive out of executive collaboration. Now all those executives who don’t want to participate in their organisations collaboration initiatives get their wish.

Features

They key features of Executive are:

• Video: Executives love video, especially video of themselves talking. Nobody can ask a question of a video and there’s no way you can be interrupted by a difficult idea.  Our proprietary software renders a video of the executive standing in a randomised corporate location spouting management speak.  This advanced AI requires no participation of the executive and has been proved in testing to be indistinguishable from the empty rhetoric of a live executive video.
• Posting Bot: This algorithm will post and like messages on behalf of the executive using exercpts of the executive’s Linkedin profile, business financial plan, family Facebook profiles, calendar, and email as source material.
• Puppet mode: Puppet mode gives the HR and Employee Communications professionals complete control of the executive’s social profile, posting and even the Video tool to enable them to author authentic simulcra of executive communication.
• Log rolling: If multiple executives have the Executive tools enabled the solution will ensure that these executives consistently praise each other and support each other’s posts. HR and Employee Communications executives will be able to trigger the virality option in log rolling to use this feature to ensure messages dominate community discussions.
• Diversity Enhancement: With the simple flick of an admin toggle, HR and Employee communications professionals can switch the gender, sexual orientation and background of executives without requiring the incovenience of change in exective positions or the cost of new hires. The Executive tool will deliver the appearance of both diversity and closing any pay gap simply by flicking this switch. Most importantly the Executives in question will never know that their appearance has been changed as this change will not be visible on their account.
• Empathy Algorithm: The empathy algorithm will optimise any actual posts of an executive to demonstrate actual human empathy. The algorithm is also responsible for corporate message alignment and any compliance or exception approvals for the executive to open their mouth online.
• Ego booster: The Executive tools will also ensure that executives posts dominate the feed algorithm, receive sufficient likes and that flattering messages are posted as replies by other employees.
• Cardboard cutout: A free cardboard cutout of the executive will be provided for use in offline collaboration.

With Executive mode, people will know your CEO is a dog-lover, but nobody need know that your CEO is a dog

A lot of nonsense has been shared by consultants, management gurus, and thought leaders on effective collaboration.  At CollabSystem we have learned from all of it.  That’s why our product solutions represent the one product you need to buy to achieve effective collaboration in your organisation.

Given the large number of models of collaboration in the marketplace, some of them even effective and credible, we have been asked often ‘What is the CollabSystem model of the human behaviour of collaboration?’

The CollabSystem Model of Collaboration

We know human beings are complex and they get more complex when you connect them in networks so we at CollabSystem know that no simple model will result in hours of mystification, total unpredictability and complete lack of science required to meet our customers’ needs.  At CollabSystem we never believe in saying something with four small words that we could say with lots of long and complex jargon. We know that the most complex diagrams generate the most interest.

It is with these key dynamics in mind that we share with you today our complex jargon-rich and consultant-speak model of Effective Collaboration.

We belive we have captured all the key elements of Collaboration in our model.  We know this because we stole them from lots of other people’s models and roughly mashed them together. We added lots of big words too. Some of which we barely understand. You should have seen how much stuff we had on our CollabSystem Wall as we developed this.

FAQs for the CollabSystem Collaboration Model

Q: Can I use the model?

A: Please download this image and share it in all your presentations of Collaboration. It is not essential that you understand the model or be able to explain it. You are looking to achieve in your audience that magical experience of an exclamation of “Ah, Science!”

Q: What do organisations think of the model?

A: Because your organisation will find all its favourite buzzwords, they will find further validation of whatever approach they are currently.  If they do challenge the model, you can simply reply “It’s not my model. Ask CollabSystem.”

Q: How do I use the model?

A: Whenever anyone asks for the logic behind your purchase of a CollabSystem solution, just show them our Collaboration Model. Most of the time they won’t even dare ask a question. If people do ask ‘How do I use the model?’, we have an expensive suite of consulting services that will confuse them so much that they will forgot the question they asked in the first place.

Q: Which organisations have used the model?

A: Yours

Q: Will the model guarantee effective collaboration in my organisation?

A: That is not the point of the model. The purchase of CollabSystem’s products is the only thing that guarantees effective collaboration. The model is to make it easier for you to buy our product.

Q: What is the science behind the model?

A: We find science interferes with faith-based technology implementations.

Q: Couldn’t the model be more complex?

A: It is. This is just the two-dimensional representation of a four-dimension space known as the zone of zones. The topology of collaboration in four dimensions is an entirely different matter. The self-referential and adaptive reflexivity of this topology should be sufficient to address the domain specific issues of determinism while avoiding simplistic answers.

Q: What should I do next?

A:Buy now

At CollabSystem, we believe in supplying your organisation with the tools that enable employees to have fun, cut through to the essential issues and share powerful and productive moments of work together. That’s why we are proud to announce the latest CollabSystem’s Productivity Solution – Collaboration Bingo.

Never again will you be bored to tears by useless, repetitive and dull advice on how to successfully transform the culture of your organisation to ensure success in a digital economy. When you hear someone discussing the future of work, the importance of collaboration or how to achieve effective innovation in organisations you can use this essential tool to celebrate and record the insights.

Complete an entire row or column and you can shout ‘Collaboration Bingo’. Complete the entire board and, as reward for your endurance, you get a speaking gig at the next Collaboration or Future of Work conference . Ask a question using an entire column or row and we will give you a free 90 day trial of our premium collaboration solutions Walking, Talking and Working. Ask a question using the entire board and we will give you a gig on the CollabSystems board.

Most importantly of all use the Collaboration Bingo board to terrorise the poor Community Manager responsible for developing employee collaboration in your organisation. Their work is not hard enough. They need more challenge and to be more widely mocked. Never again will their efforts to help employees be productive at work escape hard questions.

Just think how insightful you will seem to your peers when you ask “Is the Community Manager as Innovation CEO dead given the role of Bots as a Productivity tool?’ or “How do Viral Social Learning Metrics Bots accelerate employee adoption of Future of Work Policies?’  Most importantly of all your depth of insight will stump any inexperienced community manager who doesn’t know that the only real answer to any of these questions is ‘Just Buy Jive, IBM Connections, Socialcast, Yammer, Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Stride, CollabSystem’

 

Note: Like all good collaboration solutions the idea behind this one is stolen.

CollabSystems is proud to launch its new employee engagement tools Us vs Them. These state of the art tools drive intense employee engagement to benefit loyalty, trust and encourage all employees to embrace organisational values and beliefs.

The Power of a Clear Enemy

In 2017, it is clearer than ever that a clear enemy can be the source of deep engagement in a cohort of people. Around the world we are see deep division and alienation foster high levels of engagment, loyalty and ideological alignment. These characteristics are highly attractive to the modern corporation grappling with low levels of employee loyalty, lack of trust and engagement.

Modern employee communications professionals are keen to leverage the practices of modern digital media. The ability to coalesce a group around a clear enemy and heighten divisions to foster engagement, loyalty and belief. Tight loyalty to the group and a clear enemy will challenge employees ability to believe messages from other sources and to act collaboratively with whom you don’t want them to engage.

Us vs Them

The new Us vs Them collaboration tools suite integrates with all major collaboration platforms. The tools enable employee communications professionals to easily foster cliques, division, and alienation.

The Us vs Them tool enables employee communication professionals to quickly divide the universe of platform users into like minded employees, Us, and all others, Them. Given the complex nature of modern organisations every employee will be in one Us group, but there will be many Thems to pose a threat and represent the opposition.  

Know Your Enemy mode means that for each User, members of their Us group will be easily identifiable and presented in a flattering light. All of their Them groups will be have darkened threatening profile pictures, visible markers of their alien status, and warnings posted on their content.  In Crisis mode, the tools will auto generate threatening & abusive messages to provoke conflict and surface inter group criticism to foster division. Heritage mode enables employee communication professional to manage deep historical illusions to support the fragile and fictional nature of most Us groupings under real human interaction. 

The tool influences the algorithms on display of messages to increase the proportion in-group messages for both. Tight clustering of information in the Us group fosters loyalty and the willingness to believe what the Us group is required to believe.

As part of the admin panel for employee communications professionals and in the Home group of each Us group will be targeted meme generator solutions to enable each Us group to express their believes and enage in conflict and trolling of other groups. Video & photo manipulation tools will enable Users to develop materials that effectively represent the truth of each Us group and reinforce prevailing beliefs.

Lastly, manipulation of the messaging flows to the Us group will mean that they increasingly experience high velocity communication, regular surprising threats and a general sense of existential crisis to foster engagement and alignment to the desired Us group. Once fear is all pervasive, positive collaboration will be effectively chilled and manipulation of inter-group conflict will be more effective.

Divide and conquer has long been a tool of corporate manipulation and power. With Us vs Them, employee communication professionals will have a suite of leading edge propaganda & misinformation tools ready to leverage the divisions in their organisation for engagement and success.