I few weeks ago, Mark Harrison, CEO of Abraham Harrison, took part in a think tank in Casekow, Germany, at the Corpus Operis castle.  The subject of Mark’s talk was how Abraham Harrison recruits, manages, and maintains a staff of over 40 within the loose confines of a completely distributed, global, virtual client services company.  Mark McMillan wrote this very insightful piece about Mark’s contribution to the conference over at the Talent Function blog: Virtual Admiration – Abraham&Harrison (A model for global workforce). (Via Marketing Conversation)

This week at Corpus Operis in Casekow, Germany, I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Harrison, the CEO of Abraham&Harrison (“A&H”). A&H is a global social media marketing and public relations company [see the framed video below for a pleasurable description of what they do]. The company has a workforce of approximately 35 people operating in 5 continents, 12 countries, in 11 languages, and on 1 Internet. The A&H workforce are predominantly independent contractors, completely virtual, and global. This emerging workforce model is not uncommon, many aspire to build a business like this, but it is unusual to find someone actually doing it. So, let’s hold Abraham&Harrison up to the sun and see what we can learn.

Mark runs the business from his endless summer lairs in Mauritius, an island off the coast of India, and Berlin, Germany. He runs the company with one of his best friends, Chris Abraham who operates from Washington, DC. The business is three years old and has an international client list full of names that you would recognize.

Since the beginning Mark and Chris have consciously shaped a company culture to sustain the business lifestyle that they want. Mark was taking a well-earned sabbatical in Tanzania. Chris had started a PR company and it had grown past the overwhelm level. He asked Mark if would help him run the business. Mark’s response, “Yes, IF you agree that I am free to live wherever I want. My freedom is what I value most. I’ll do it if we agree to run the company as a virtual company.” And so, the first seed of the A&H workforce culture was planted. Mark and Chris have worked hard, with their team, to establish and embody a culture that delivers results for clients while maintaining the lifestyle that the workforce WANTS. Here are some highlights to the A&H workforce approach:

All Accept that Freedom = Responsibility. With a virtual, contracted workforce, there is inherent freedom. There is no boss watching you. No one can see if you have showered, or if you do your laundry at 2:30 in the afternoon. The “virtual risk” is that workers will not work and that it will take a long time to figure that out. The virtual model requires workers who are self-motivated and who accept responsibility for getting the work done. The virtual risk is mitigated by the inherent pressure of being an independent contractor. Since there is no guarantee of a next project, contractors tend to work very hard. Actually at A&H, contractors tend to work too hard. This is a big concern of Mark’s and he regularly protects his contractors from themselves. There is no notion of a 9 to 5 work day but everyone is grounded in the responsibility for selling and delivering work.

Recruitment via Nepotism. Effective recruiting is particularly essential with a virtual, global workforce. Mark proudly relies on nepotism as a primary recruiting tool, “In our environment, our workers feel great responsibility for the people that they introduce into a project. It reflects on them and that produces a very results-oriented energy.” Leadership by Capacity (not by role). Mark and Chris have deliberately created a culture that emphasizes people’s strengths. Team members are encouraged to take projects and tasks that fit their strengths. At times this means that Mark and Chris step aside and let others lead tasks that typical executives would insist on doing. Since they leverage all cloud-managed business applications, the tasks of the business are available for everyone to see. There is total transparency to the work at hand.

Currency Awareness. The A&H corporate lexicon includes the word “currency” which has a different meaning than monetary value. Currency refers to each person’s set of prioritized value drivers that they want from their work at A&H. For example, someone’s currency might look like:

Team Member 1 = freedom, money, the opportunity to play and create
Team Member 2 = predictable pay, time with kids, no emergencies
Team Member 3 = power, respect, responsibility, trust

Mark and Chris make a point of knowing what is most important to their staff and they talk about it openly. It is a bit like how people throw around the Myers-Briggs identities [INTJ, ENTJ, etc...] to describe themselves. Currency awareness pervades decision making at A&H: how they assign projects, how they schedule meetings, how they communicate with each other, etc… The currency concept provides them with a roadmap to create a sustainable workforce.

Total Communication. We rarely get to see our digital co-workers. They live in our phones and in our computers. And aside from an occasional astronaut quality visage through Skype, we don’t have the opportunity to read body language. And global co-workers work when we are sleeping, or when we are bringing the kids to school. How do you keep everyone on the same page? A&H approach this by putting everything in the digital cloud. All calendars, documents, spreadsheets, project plans, go into the A&H cloud. Everyone can see what everyone is doing, and has done. And, they cultivate a cc / bcc / reply-all culture so there is a forensic record of everything. To make this system work, Mark and Chris make sure that they are very accessible to their teams. The most impressive thing is that they actually have an articulated communication protocol. This approach also presumes that people know how to leverage email-rule functionality so that inboxes don’t become overwhelm boxes.

“No-Emergencies” Culture. If a leader or client has a work style that seems to produce a steady stream of last minute emergency meetings, then it spreads out of control. If it gets enabled consistently, then it becomes a feature of the entire culture. And make no mistake, it erodes the quality. Mark and Chris work hard to mitigate this by embodying and enforcing a no-emergencies culture. At A&H everyone buys into an agreement that meetings are only booked with at least 1-day advanced notice and meetings should never be more than 1 hour. This policy takes discipline and it does require Mark and Chris to push back on clients on a regular basis. Emergencies do come up, but at A&H they almost always real versus personality-driven emergencies.

As you can tell, I am a big fan of A&H and their leadership team. They are living the virtual, global company dream in a real way. The conscious, overt crafting of a culture that provides a holistic lifestyle for its workers is an inspiration. Can large organizations learn from the A&H example? What happens when you design the company to produce engagement?

I have been very happy with Central Desktop as part of the Abraham Harrison business and client services platform.

We had previously used Basecamp HQ. I didn’t mind it but my team hated it so I had Sara Wilson and Saul Wainwright go out to explore all of the project management, task management, business management, and process management tools out there — a collaboration tool that my team and I could use every day to help synchronize our daily work.

We needed all the help we can get since Abraham Harrison is a virtual and distributed company, spread across 7 countries and 16 times zones. When Saul and Sara finally made their recommendation, they recommended Central Desktop.

Back in April, Saul wrote an article on Marketing Conversation, Central Desktop Does it for us!!, and we received the associated buzz from Central Desktop.

Central Desktop offers a lot of different things, including group shared calendars, collaborative wikis, intranet tools, project collaboration, task management, web conferencing, audio conferencing, extranets tools, project management, forums, group discussions, salesforce.com, global search, online spreadsheets, and iCal compatibility.

We have limited our Central Desktop usage so far to project collaboration, task management, group wikis, asset and file management and storage, group discussions, and the iCal feature. We use Google Apps (Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Calendar) religiously so there are certain things we don’t need from Central Desktop. We’re also slowly drinking the Salesforce.com kool-aid, so I am sure we’ll start making that work for us soon.

Anyway, I am posting Saul’s review of Central Desktop below because I think it is very interesting and I think you’ll learn a lot and maybe check Central Destop out.

Central Desktop Does it for us!!

So, I don’t know if I have mentioned this on our blog. But, we spent months, and I mean literally months looking around for a web based project management tool that met the needs of Abraham Harrison. You would think that this would be an easy mission. Hell no!!

We wanted to dump Basecamp so badly, yet we didn’t wanna go to something else that was kind of….well…ho hum!!! Just when I was at the end of my tether in the search a bit of synchronicity came along and a potential client mentioned Central Desktop to us.

So, off I ran and checked out this software – it was on my list but I hadn’t really give it much of a go. After a week of digging around, having my Executive Assistant dig around in CD – we both agreed that this was the one for us.

It is simple, clean, fast and does what it needs to do. There are elements missing, for sure, but that is a given. My biggest gripe is their need to integrate more time tracking/management capabilities. However, after a phone call with the CEO, Isaac Garcia (heck how often do you get to talk to the CEO of a company as a small time client) he assured me that they are working on many improvements.

What I found so cool about this company (besides their awesome platform) was that they had built this tool up without any major funding, with paying customers – no, “come use us for free” approach in the hope that it would make them popular. No, they did it while having to please paying customers.

So, last week I got an email from Isaac, following up on the phone call we had had a week earlier and he informed me that Central Desktop had just got its first round of major funding – $7 million from Openview Venture Partners. Not bad, not bad at all….especially when you realize that Openview is one of Central Desktops paying customers (well, maybe they will give them a free account).

I like seeing companies do it the old fashion way. Create a good product, get people to buy it and watch it grow. Hell, getting popular off “free giveaways” is always easier, but certainaly doesn’t guarantee a good product.

Congrats Isaac and the CD gang!! We over at AH look forward to more and more slick features and are stoked that you guys are around.

I woke up to an amazing article written by Jonathan Trenn, The fallacy of community, and I responded in a comment to a pretty passionate article and a passionate comment string, and here’s what I wrote — and I have expanded the argument below, so it is an expansion. Via Marketing Conversation.

Gosh, I don’t know what to say here… there are so many different types of communities, many of which can surely be manufactured. What every successful community requires is community leadership. Community leadership can be organic and emergent or they can be hired in the form of online community managers or facilitators. A strong leadership — people who have skin in the game — is more important than a good web application; also, these community leaders are often the main draw to the community and can be the difference between keeping or losing your members when a competitor comes to town.

Here are some types of communities, as pulled from Wikipedia:

• Communities of Action
• Communities of Circumstance
• Communities of Interest
• Communities of Position
• Communities of Practice
• Communities of Purpose

Many of these can be created, in much the same way that one may create a garden. I think the biggest problem with these sort of things — community-creation — is that people do it wrong, and they have been doing it wrong for at least a decade.

Back in the day, when I worked at Caucus Systems, we manufactured communities for businesses — virtual teams, virtual conferences, and whatnot. And it worked quite well, to be sure, and they were powerful and transforming.

What most companies don’t understand is that communities require facilitators and managers. They always have. AOL hired community managers back in 1995 when they created communities, the Well and Caucus and Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms have paid and unpaid community managers and facilitators.

The mistake that most companies make is that they assume that if they build it, they will come. It is not true. You can create a Wiki, a Message Board, Forums, or a Blog and it doesn’t mean anything at all.

In fact, people will spend all of this time putting together a message board, fill it with conversation-starters, and then open the doors, promote the hell out of it, and still nothing will happen.

What is required to manufacture a community is passionate members — and they can be paid. However, if they’re paid, you need to hire them from a pool of OD experts or a pool of topical experts — or, you can poach them from another community, always the best way.

So, WordPress and phpBB are not killer apps, the killer apps are the people who start and maintain conversation, the people who re-seed conversation, the people who catalyze conversation, the people who show interest and ask questions, and the people who protect the other members through active moderation.

In fact, I am an expert in this. You can restart an old thread, you can catalyze a conversation, you can break out an off-topic thread to a new topic hope.  It is an art, but it is an art that anyone who knows conversation, who knows facilitation, and who knows people, can do — and it happens all the time “organically” on all of the online boards we’re so in love with.

Hell, get WordPress, phpBB, or Wikimedia for free — or buy vBulletin for a little money — and put the rest of your budget towards hiring professional Community Managers.

Hell, if it weren’t for Jonathan Trenn on Marketing Conversation, we would be done for on this blog. He’s the glue and he’s the only reason why you are all here.

Saul Wainwright at Work for Abraham Harrison LLC, originally uploaded by Chris Abraham.

Here’s a picture of our Abraham Harrison LLC Director of Client Services, Saul Wainwright, as he works busily from our Cape Town, South Africa, location. Yes, Saul is a greenie treehugger, but that’s just how we roll. You’ll also notice that he’s also a Mac user, which is what all self-respecting treehuggers use. And, since we’re working on the ooVoo campaign, he has a gorgeous new webcam. And yes, that is the ocean outside his window!

“So, how do you deal with the quirks of having a virtual company?,” asks Saul Wainwright