10 Keys to Changing Business?

There is an old saying, “if you stay in this world you will never learn another one.” Learning the dynamics, the art and the science of the new world created by the social web is one of the foremost challenges for businesses.

Current business theories are correct in their own world, but the problem is that the theory may not make contact with the new world.

For businesses to succeed in the new world a transformation in leadership thinking will be required.

tags: organization, change, humanresources, socialnetworks, innovation, relationship, relations, empowerment

Umair Haque How to Build a Next-Gen Business Now

The macro crisis tells us that it’s time to get serious about what we’ve been discussing for the last few months: building a better kind of business. So here’s a five-step construction kit for tomorrow’s revolutionaries.

tags: crisis, business, organization, management, meaning, sense, strategy

• The macro crisis tells us that it’s time to get serious about what we’ve been discussing for the last few months: building a better kind of business. So here’s a five-step construction kit for tomorrow’s revolutionaries.
• That’s the third, simplest, and most fundamental step in building next-generation businesses: understanding that next-generation businesses are built on new DNA, or new ways to organize and manage economic activities.
• Think that sounds like science fiction? Think again. Here are just a few of the most radical new organizational and management techniques today’s revolutionaries are already utilizing: open-source production, peer production, viral distribution, radical experimentation, connected consumption, and co-creation.

• Yet, listing all of those components is just a start – and a poor one, because it’s just the sterile, often meaningless language of economics. The fifth, final, and most difficult step in building next-generation businesses is this: we have to put the meaning back into business.

  For too long, business has been meaningless: a passionless, soul-crushing game of ripping the next guy’s head off, to attain a short-lived competitive advantage – often simply balanced out by someone else’s disadvantage – in order to score points on an illusory scoreboard of “shareholder value creation”.

• This final step – rediscovering meaning in the work we do – isn’t just the most difficult to come to grips with. It’s also the most critical – because though the other steps are necessary, they’re not sufficient. Without a deeply felt – and a powerfully lived – sense of meaning, every business will devolve to what the investment banks became: machines engineered with relentless precision to destroy long-run value, often implosively so.

ReThinking & Rebuilding Business?

Cultures, by predisposition, both embrace and resist change, depending on culture traits. For example, the social web could play complementary roles in existing business cultures to those that embrace its dynamics.

On the other hand for those that resist the shift of power to the consumer the social web represents a very real threat.. Thus there are both dynamic influences that encourage acceptance of the social web, and controlling forces that resist what the social web threatens.

tags: socialmedia, socialweb, disruption, change, culture

• Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object (Sound like the social web?).
• It found that people were more likely to adopt, or even consider adopting, if people they know and respect have adopted. Imitation is the strongest influence channel. Therefore, the most effective marketing strategy is to first sell to the early adopters, then reinforce the diffusion to each successive level, but not to waste resources on trying to reach any given level before it is ready for it.

• Markets, businesses and people adjust to disruption is three ways:

  1. Fighting it
  2. Adapting to it
  3. Accelerating it
• Google’s series of revolutions tell us that it is when we forget how business is and has been – and instead, focus on what business can be and should be – that we can rediscover and reignite new paths to advantage.
• ou don’t need to invest billions to disrupt industries with shared resources – a few million devoted to a handful of bright people will do

The Silo Lives! Analyzing Coordination and Communication in Multiunit Companies — HBS Working Knowledge

Although many companies aspire to promote easy interaction and coordination across departments, office locations, and pay scales, the “boundaryless” organization—like the paperless office—hasn’t materialized.

The corporate silo is alive and well.

tags: communication, silos, email, management, network, interactions

• “We were surprised by how little interaction occurs across three major boundaries: the strategic business unit, the organizational function, and the geographic office location,” Stuart says.
• In other words, people talk to the very same people they e-mail. As electronic collaboration technologies further develop, this may change. For now, e-mail interactions seem to reinforce human relations.
• Our analysis indicates that two people who are in the same SBU, function, and office interact about 1,000 times more frequently than two people at the company who are in different business units, functions, and offices, but are otherwise similar. Practically speaking, this means that there is very little interaction across these boundaries.
• We think this work will give insight into how individuals can plot the course for more successful careers and how firms can guide the career paths of their employees to create a better-connected social structure that will be better able to implement their strategies.

The services game: Will you trust a tech company to solve your business problems? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Then all the IT giants will be talking about how they solve business process problems more than deliver technology.

tags: IT, business, technology, IBM, services, businessservices

About communities, social media and the customer support department

The customer support and the proper implementation of social media tools around it have brought quite a lot of profit and success to the sales and marketing teams of many large and medium size companies globally. WordFrame sales and support team members are promoting the idea of having the support team as being inseparable part of the marketing and sales teams for several years now. One of the ways to do this (i.e. to have your support department actively participating in the sales process as well as in the business development strategy of your organization) is to equip it with the proper communication, social media and sales tools and ….Voila!

tags: customersupport, problemsolving, conversations, informationflows, communities, socialmedia

Awareness Report on Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008

Employers are starting to allow social media participation more freely in their organizations: The number of organizations that allow social networking for business purposes has increased dramatically to 69 percent in 2008 up from 37 percent last year.

Employers are finding the benefits of using social media: 63 percent are using social media to build and promote their brand, 61 percent are using it to improve communication and collaboration, and 58 percent re using it to increase consumer engagement.

tags: awareness, enterprise2.0, web2.0, adoption, communities, socialnetworking, enterprisesocialsoftware, enterprisesocialnetworking, bestpractices

The AppGap » » Happy at Work/Happy in Work: News, views, and reviews of Work 2.0 tools, apps and practices

What makes people happy at work? Connections with other people. What do the connections mean for us? According to Rob Cross, who closed the Network Roundtable last week with thoughts on the importance of networks, listed some of the ways we use our social networks at work:

* Help getting work done
* Advancing our careers
* Gaining political support for new projects and ideas
* Making sense of events, rumors or trends
* Seeking personal support (e.g. after a bad day)
* Gaining a sense of purpose in work

tags: socialnetworks, happiness, networks, performance

Les réseaux sociaux améliorent les relations client et augmentent les ventes pour les entreprises – M2IE : le blog du management de l’IE et de l’entreprise 2.0

Une étude (CRM and Social Media: Creating Deeper Customer Relationships) commandée par Avanade et réalisée par le cabinet Coleman Parkes Research explique que les entreprises qui utilisent les réseaux sociaux améliorent leur relation client et augmentent leurs ventes. Cette étude a été menée auprès de 541 cadres supérieurs, en Amérique du Nord, en Europe et en Asie-Pacifique. Cependant, elle met aussi en évidence la frilosité des cadres, comme le principal frein à l’adoption des nouveaux médias tels les réseaux sociaux. Ce qui montre que la plupart des entreprises ne sont pas encore prêtes pour adopter les réseaux sociaux.

tags: socialnetworking, socialnetworks, sales

• Plus de 75 % des entreprises dans le monde admettent que les réseaux
  sociaux s’imposeront, s’ils ne font pas l’objet d’une gestion anticipée
• 9 sociétés sur 10 reconnaissent que la prochaine génération d’employés
  ouvrira la voie à cette évolution au travail.
• Plus de 60 % des sondés conviennent que les réseaux sociaux sont l’avenir
  des entreprises en matière de collaboration et de technologie.
• 3 sociétés sur 5 reconnaissent que les dirigeants ne saisissent pas le
  potentiel qu’offrent ces réseaux sociaux, tant aux entreprises qu’aux
  clients.

Changement: Boeing, entreprise de services

Un article explique que 4/5ème du 787 est fabriqué hors de chez Boeing. Que des accords avec des sous-traitants leur permettraient de participer directement à l’assemblage de l’avion.

tags: boeing, outsourcing, suppliers

Email becomes a dangerous distraction – BizTech – Technology – smh.com.au

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

tags: email, interruption, productivity, deloitte, blogs, rss

• surveyed 250 users and discovered that 56% spent more than two
  hours a day in their inbox (bit.ly/email4). Most felt they got too
  much email – by January 2008, 38% of respondents received more than
  100 emails a day – and that it stopped them from doing other
  things.
• The third group, however,
  reacted negatively to the pressure of email. “That causes stress,”
  says Dr Renaud, “and stress causes all sorts of health
  problems.”
• Deloitte’s “no email Wednesday” was abandoned after a month
  (bit.ly/email6) and Intel found that there was a “clear
  incompatibility” between the need of the pilot group to communicate
  asynchronously with colleagues and the avoidance of email for a
  whole day (bit.ly/email7).
• No-email days don’t work, says Dr
  Stafford, “because they don’t help people to change their behaviour
  while they are actually using email. Once your email is back,
  you’re going to respond to it in the same old ways unless you
  replace your bad habits.”