Author: carlosmorley

 

Moving the dial is no small achievement. The massive expansion of administration has also fuelled an equally stark expansion of empty activities. Unless your company understands the informal social network of employees (which is how work really gets done), your communication and collaboration program will just be a set of silos.

The old adage of the customer is always right needs to be embedded systemically into organisations. Convenience is the new loyalty. We need to need to “upgrade the operating system.” What are your thoughts on saying yes? Which step have you reached today?

Culture is a (if not the) key component of your company strategy. A coherent and consistent business culture is as important as your business strategy. To lead change successfully, we need a new breed of leaders who understand the concept of valuing employees as a whole person. Servant leaders are human-centred leaders who value service and stewardship. A future-oriented mindset is essential in today’s rapidly changing technological world.

Start with a culture of Problem Solving by the people doing the real work! Expand your potential and define your creative niche. Explore new ways to approach your critical challenges. Choose your friends (and connections) wisely. Surround yourself with people who continually challenge you and build your confidence. Keep negativity at bay.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done. Ready to grow your business?

It is up to you to make it happen.

This post is composed entirely of lines from posts on a single LinkedIn feed

At CollabSystem, we realise the critical metric for the performance of a collaboration system is our exit price.  That’s why CollabSystem’s management team today announced its perfect willingness to walk away with a large or even a small suitcase of cash.  We are so willing to walk away we will even take a small brown paper bag or a neatly wrapped bundle.

The collaboration market is tough.  Unlike CollabSystem, most vendors can’t guarantee that their products work like magic when they are turned on straight from the cloud without the need for additional adoption support. Many independent vendors are competing with products that are increasingly deeply integrated into the stack of major software vendors.  In addition, there is always a buzzy new product from a hot start-up or a behemoth of the software industry to distract clients and have them pondering a product switch as a magic bullet.

At CollabSystem we are realists, we know the buzz has never really kicked in for us the way it did for others. We know how good our product really is. No matter how unrealistic our product promises we just haven’t struck that vein of customer success that results in the big payday of an IPO and a forced sale to private equity players or other vulture purchasers a decade later.

If CollabSystems is acquired, we guarantee to ensure that the interests of our customers are met until at least the cheque has cleared.  We value our customers and we would never want their needs to get lost in declining services levels, arduous integration processes and the eventual surprise shut down of our product, unless the return to us justified selling them out.

So we have only one phrase of advice to our competitors and other potential acquirers: Make it rain.

via GIPHY

Underpinning any good adoption plan for collaboration technology is winning an investment of time and attention by users. CollabSystem’s product range has solved this important issue through attention-grabbing gamification and AR retina-integration.

The Need for Time and Attention

CollabSystem’s products need your attention. Lots of your attention. Our research highlights that your employee’s waste more than half their time each day in the production line of email communication and wasteful pointless meetings.  We would much rather that your employees wasted their time on our product. We can’t guarantee you any greater productivity but our analytics packages will produce great charts of employee adoption as a result.  We know this critical data will drive your career and our next round valuation.

Gamifying For Eyeballs

Our products have been designed to take advantage of gamification, FOMO and our unending appetite for distraction at work to ensure that your employee keep coming back and devoting their wasteful time to our product. Due to legal advice from our counsel, we have been unable to create a genuine addiction to our product at this point, but we are still working on it.

Our system of notifications, badges, emails, alerts, status rewards and the fast flowing stream of messages will deliver a steady stream of achievement and oxytocin to your desperate employees. The appearance of doing meaningful work, interacting with peers and gaining social status will grab a growing share of their time.

Our ephemeral message features and our fast flowing message streams will make sure that FOMO is maximised. Any employee who misses a message will be fully aware that they have slipped behind their peers and that their manager has been notified of their incompetence. Experience suggests this approach is effective at behaviour modification.

Deep AR-to-Retina Integration

Even with our advanced features, there are times that your employees will look elsewhere. We have a way to stop that.  That’s why we are pleased to announce that from Q3 2017 we will be leveraging developments in Augmented Reality and Human to Machine integration in offering CollabSystem AR-to-Retina Integration.  Once the new feature is enabled, your employees will see their CollabSystem feeds wherever they go. The continuous status updates will crowd out their life 24×7.  We will have complete control of their attention and useful data gathering opportunities on how to expand their work into a greater part of their lives. AR is the future. It is inescapable and we want CollabSystems to be a part of that stimulating, engaging and lucrative future.

 

Sarah at the end of a busy day testing the science of collaboration

Collaboration Overload has become an important debate in many business publications. Sure the studies are mostly misrepresented or overblown, but at CollabSystem we know how to jump on a bandwagon to ship product. Here is how our product solutions guarantee to burn out and dishearten your employees. Don’t worry about changing the culture of the organisation, just add our products and watch engaged employees drop.

Start With An Unusual Definition of Collaboration

For the purposes of our study rather than define collaboration in any way reflecting two people coming together to complete work, we decided to define it as a rolling series of ad hoc meetings and obscure tasks shuffled from one employee to another by email.  We find this is how most organisations work.

Add Top Quality Misrepresented Scientific Research

At CollabSystems we know how to do cheap but effective.  We couldn’t actually get any reputable scientists to work on our project. That left our HR team who have run some horrendous experiments in their time. Our HR directors said it was unethical and expensive for us to test on monkeys. She suggested the interns were cheaper and more compliant.

So we asked our interns to sit in a series of conference rooms all day with mindless individual tasks to complete. At regular intervals during the day, managers entered the room to threaten their jobs or sent emails completely reorganising the meeting rooms and individual tasks. Like most managers, our goal was to maximise fear and confusion and generally interfere with delivery. We saw lots of fear, some delivery, but no signs of collaboration.

Finally, we told the interns that if the job wasn’t completed on time, Sarah would be sacked. Most of the interns expressed relief at this and demonstrated a strong willingness to collaborate with Sarah now.  Collaboration overload skyrocketed as everyone stopped work, emailed Sarah their uncompleted tasks and went to have a drink with the managers in the other conference room. We view the experiment conclusive proof of collaboration overload. Sarah’s case will be settled soon on confidential terms.

How CollabSystem Tools Guarantee Collaboration Overload

We have identified three key elements to effective collaboration overload: fear, lack of recognition and lack of human relationships in the workplace. Our CollabSystem tools have been engineered to maximise the impact of all three elements and worsen collaboration overload in your teams. Using CollabSystem tools, you can guarantee that all employees feel socially isolated, publicly exposed to threats and fears and offered little support or recognition for the work they do for anyone.

With CollabSystem tools in your workplace, all your employees can feel as overloaded as Sarah.

 

WOLFEAR – Why share when you can shout?

Working Out Loud is an important practice that helps organisations and their users to see the benefits of collaboration in their organisations. At CollabSystem we have optimised all the worst elements of the practice of Working Out Loud for our new proprietary approach to Working Out Loud – WOLFEAR: Working Out Loud For Fame Ego And Riches.

Our Definition of WOLFEAR

We define Working Out Loud For Fame, Ego And Riches as:

The process of blathering on publicly like A-grade exhibitionistic narcissist about one’s own importance, success and intelligence to alienate one’s network relationships, foster one’s ego and dominate all the attention until the droning sound of your own voice brings fame, power, money or psychic relief.

The key elements of WOLFEAR are:

• Total self-centredness
• Loud, continuous, repetitive self-promotion
• All-consuming greed
• Lack of interest in listening to others or learning from others
• No visible connection to work.

How to Practice WOLFEAR

There is only one authorised way to practice WOLFEAR. Our lawyers are highly effective so don’t even consider adapting our approach. The proprietary steps to practice WOLFEAR are:

1. Buy a CollabSystem collaboration solution (or maybe two)
2. Use the new tool to talk to your employees about yourself: our approach will help you identify the best messages such as recommended photos displaying your current wealth, power and success. Remember you are seeking to promote yourself and humiliate others as much as possible.
3. Spend as much time talking about the process of promoting yourself as you do promoting yourself. Help others understand exactly how effective you are at using WOLFEAR.
4. Automate the self-promotion so that it can continue without any time, attention or investment by you.  If automation is not possible, outsource the WOLFEAR activities to your assistant, corporate communications or marketing team.
5. Ignore all feedback, comments or interactions: you don’t want anything to disturb the comforting sound of your own voice
6. Allow the WOLFEAR messages to continue until your success or satisfaction arrives.

The Benefits of WOLFEAR

Practice WOLFEAR consistently and CollabSystem will guarantee you:

• your time will no longer be wasted listening to friends
• your personal brand will be as reflective or reality as your dating profile
• everyone will have the same impression of you
• a grandiose sense of self-importance
• few remaining inhibitions; and
• few other tangible benefits that are worth anything to others

A typical digital workplace showing the diversity of the generations

Much ink has been spilled over the role of demographics in the future of work. Coining a new generation is lucrative work, particularly as much of it is nonsense. CollabSystem doesn’t want to miss an opportunity to waste ink so here is our guide to leveraging CollabSystem solutions with the key generations in the Workplace of the Future.

Boomers and Older: CollabSystem is not compatible with Boomers and older generations. We recommend you remove these from your workforce immediately, if they have not removed themselves by now. We are talking about the generations of the future here. That means young ones. Older people might be wise, experienced, effective, and insightful.  They have a lot of life to share but let them go do a TEDX talk. Upgrade your Boomer employee as quickly as possible, CEO and Board members excepted as per usual. The Boomer and older generations don’t need collaborative work. Let them celebrate their life achievements, their comfortable shoes, and prodigious share of human wealth.

A boomer celebrating the absence of CollabSystems in their life

Generation X: CollabSystem is fully fax-compatible. Generation Xers who wish to relive this transformative technology can send or receive posts by fax. Generation X remember back to a childhood when the world was black and white and CollabSystem offers an option to switch all images to their preferred mode of smug sophistication (see below).  Generation X know they are the last generation to benefit from general sense of prosperity and they don’t intend to share anything with anyone. This is the generation that privatised the world. Private group features in CollabSystem will appeal to their sense of entitlement, exclusivity, and fear of retribution.

Smug Sophistication is fully supported for Generation X. Red wine is not included.

Generation Y: This Generation was named because nobody can remember why they are here. They are so obscure there is no precise dates for when this generation begins and ends. Most people have stopped referring to this generation. CollabSystem supports their preference for text messaging as the sole form of human communication at least as long as their plan offers free messaging. When they move out of their parent’s houses and take responsibility for their future, we will develop further features.

A rare sighting of a Generation Y in the wild

Digital Natives:  Digital Natives have experienced nothing but the internet era. CollabSystems gets them deeply. We communicate directly with their brains over Wifi using a fully secure API interface. We get their passion for navigating the urban jungles of the planet as digital nomads. CollabSystems translates all global languages into hip phrases for tattoos as badly as they do. Hipster mode adds a beard to all images, comes with an integrated espresso machine and adds a steampunk veneer across all our user interfaces. CollabSystem recognises that for digital natives work is deeply secondary to a fulfilling life purpose. With a flick of a button, you can provide your Digital Natives with a convincing simulacrum of purpose through gamification. Digital Natives can level up to real purpose when you have had time to replace them with robots.

Collaborating in the Urban Jungle with Digital Natives

Every organisation demands document security. There are complex legal and administrative requirements that mean organisations must take great care of their documents. Many organisations take better care of documents than their employees. No wonder document retention often exceeds employee retention. Employees would rather leave than see their old files again. CollabSystem promises to change all that.

CollabSystem is delighted to announce three new totally secure document management systems: Delete, Shredder and Fire. We recognise that different documents present different document storage risks and have developed a solution for each level of risk. These three solutions ensure that your documents are treated the way they deserve and you will face no residual legal issues from your document storage policies.

What is even more exciting for clients is that Delete, Shredder, and Fire each have a simple one-off consumption pricing model. There are no long-term storage costs to worry about. CollabSystem take care of your documents for you and you never have to worry about accessing or answering questions on the documents again.

Delete

Delete is the perfect document retention system for digital files. With one-button click, users will see their digital files stored permanently in the cloud where they will remain totally safe and secure forever. CollabSystems Delete solution ensures files cannot be accessed by anyone. Our cryptographic logging and indexing system even ensures that nobody can identify that the document ever existed to prevent unauthorised users accessing a document following storage. Should an record of a document be discovered in Delete’s routine scans of the organisation’s digital files, Delete will instantly corrupt the hard drive of every device in the organisation to prevent further unauthorised storage and access. Like any good digital document storage solution, Delete will impose an arbitrarily small file size limit on all users meaning that should they retain any documents they will eventually be unable to work. Delete also effectively secures and wipes all phones, tablets, USB sticks and cloud drives connected to the organisation’s network.

Shredder

Shredder is the CollabSystem document retention solution for low risk and insecure documents. Shredder can take any form of paper document. However Shredder is sensitive to paperclips and staples. We recomend having a intern on standby while Shredder is in consumption mode to address any jams that arise. Shredder is ideal for all those plans, strategy documents and business cases that you have developed and stored in lever arch folders with no further reference to their contents. Shredder is not recommended for high risk documents. We also recommend that following implementation of Shredder, the organisation let the intern go, prepare to deny everthing and blame the intern.

Fire

Fire is the document retention system for high risk and urgent documents. Clients with extensive physical documents in storage requiring an urgent document retention strategy have found Fire the ideal solution. In less than 3 hours, Fire can consume up to an entire warehouse of documents. Fire works equally well when documents are on-premise or stored in an off-site or third-party storage facility. Importantly following a full implementation of Fire, documents can be guaranteed to be totally secure. It is recommended that clients implementing Fire update their insurance policies and prepare for embarrasing questions.