Is the Internet Second Nature?

Lynne Waldera knows a Net-centric outfit when she sees one -- or, rather, when she studies one. Waldera, 38, has spent nearly 15 years doing research on leadership and organizational development, and today she is president and CEO of the research firm InMomentum Inc. Recently, after surveying thousands of employees at 15 companies, she formulated a diagnostic tool that she calls the iCulture Index. High-iCulture companies, she says, have shared traits that are strengthened, and indeed required, by life in the Internet economy.

In an interview with Fast Company, Waldera described how several of those traits work.

Idea-to-market execution. Companies with high iCulture make it easy for workers to turn ideas into products and to bring products into the marketplace.

Adobe Systems has a great mechanism for this: the IdeaStudio. Any employee in the company can submit an idea to the studio, which is equipped with a vast array of customer data, along with tools for evaluating business models. The studio makes a go or no-go decision quickly and then provides resources to help flesh out a successful idea. Essentially, Adobe has found a way to operationalize innovation.

Customer-centricity. High-iCulture organizations excel at collecting customer data and at turning customer needs into practices and tools that touch every employee.

At Cisco Systems, most staff members have a customer-satisfaction score in their performance evaluation. Employees, both internal and external, are graded on the degree to which they have satisfied customers. That makes it very, very clear to Cisco's people where they should focus their time and energy.

Network connectivity. High-iCulture companies are interconnected: They promote communication between departments and divisions. This trait goes beyond just having an Intranet. It's about having a network structure, as opposed to a hierarchy.

Adobe now has nearly 3,000 employees, but it still holds monthly all-hands meetings that are Webcast. That helps the company retain its closeness, even though not everyone can fit in the same room anymore.

Heroic leadership. Across the board, high-iCulture companies have leaders who inspire people with their vision and credibility, and we found that the Internet is a huge factor in enabling such leadership.

In our survey of Cisco employees, 90% of them say that they have weekly contact with top managers, and most of that contact occurs through Cisco's Intranet. That helped the credibility of Cisco's leaders -- because, when the time came to ask the organization to turn on a dime, they had a relationship of trust with employees.

For more information on the iCulture Index, visit InMomentum Inc. on the Web (www.inmomentum.com/products/survey.html).