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How Knowledge Can Hurt Innovation
How do you break free from the curse of knowledge? Spending a lot of time with customers helps. The more you listen to what the customer says and doesn’t say, the more you can make sure that your intuition is attuned to the customer’s knowledge base. Recognizing the curse helps as well. Make a regular habit of asking questions such as, « Is this our view, or the view of our target customer? »
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The basic problem: people who have deep knowledge about a topic sometimes assume other people have that same knowledge. That can lead to major missteps.
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How do you break free from the curse of knowledge? Spending a lot of time with customers helps. The more you listen to what the customer says and doesn’t say, the more you can make sure that your intuition is attuned to the customer’s knowledge base. Recognizing the curse helps as well. Make a regular habit of asking questions such as, « Is this our view, or the view of our target customer? »
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Make a regular habit of asking questions such as, « Is this our view, or the view of our target customer? »
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Leaders: Listen to Your Salespeople!
Your best salespeople possess vast knowledge about how to connect with and motivate people – and perhaps take the company to the next level. But they rarely get to share their knowledge with senior managers. As a practitioner and student of business-to-business selling for more than half a century, Clif Reichard has learned to translate sales knowledge into leadership knowledge. This post is one in an occasional series.
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Why Your Employees Act Like Employees
People follow their leader’s example. Have you looked in the mirror lately? Do you use a respectful tone when interacting with your employees and customers? Does your summer wardrobe look more like cruise wear than business attire? Take a close look at yourself, before passing judgment on others.
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Launch of Social Media Strategy Framework
Today we launch our Social Media Strategy Framework. This provides guidance and a frame on how organizations can approach engaging with social media, following in the tradition of our highly popular frameworks such as Web 2.0 Framework, Future of the Media Lifecycle, and Influence Landscape.
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Management 2.0 : collaborer, l’avenir de l’entreprise?
Ceci est le dernier billet avant la pause de mi-année. Je reviens sur une interview accordé au McKinsey Quarterly par John Chambers le CEO de Cisco, , qui pour moi est l’exemple même de l’entreprise 2.0. J’avais déjà parlé de cette entreprise ici. Si John Chambers aborde différents sujets (la crise, les partenariats public-privé, la question du leadership, les technologies web), c’est surtout la partie sur l’entreprise collaborative qui m’intéresse dans ce cas.
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Ainsi Chambers s’investit dans seulement deux ou trois
communautés, les autres directeurs aussi (malgré leur penchant pour le
commandement), et ainsi ce n’est plus 10 personnes qui font tourner
l’entreprise, mais 500. -
Il ne s’agit plus pour les directeurs d’attendre les « reportings » des
collaborateurs et vérifier le budget. Le directeur doit devenir le porte-parole
de sa communauté et la représenter efficacement. Surtout que les décisions sont
transversales et impactent toute l’organisation.
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Do You Really Know What Your Employees Think?
Corporate leaders do not need to hire pollsters but they do need to be more cognizant of the impact of their messages. Most managers are very good at giving messages; following up with repeated iterations is more of a challenge, but a greater challenge is often gauging the effect of the message. We see this most evidently during organizational transformation efforts. There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm expended in getting the word out about the « big change » but relatively little follow up in terms of listening and evaluating impact. To address this, consider these suggestions when crafting your next communication plan.
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Does social media really correlate with the bottom line? Color me skeptical
A study has found that revenue, gross margins and profits correlate nicely with companies that are the most engaged with social media. Should you build a portfolio around these highly engaged social media friendly brands? Probably not.
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Don’t confuse Enterprise 2.0 with social computing concepts
Earlier this week, a post by Thomas Vanderwal on Microsoft SharePoint 2007 caught fire on Twitter and a few blogs. What started as a spirited discussion on whether Sharepoint is a respectable Enterprise 2.0 offering or not, quickly turned into a debate on Enterprise 2.0 definitions. Mike Gotta masterfully jumped in front of the parade and steered it hard right, questioning whether Enterprise 2.0 is even a category or a rather, a philosophy around the use of social computing within existing business processes. With due respect to Forrester, I’m convinced it’s the latter.
In preparation for a meeting with an old client next week about social computing and the opportunities it presents for lead generation and sales operations, this discussion could not have been more timely for me. Here’s how I see it:
These are social computing concepts. Not Enterprise 2.0.
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Broader E2.0 Horizons
Most tools labeled Enterprise 2.0 just scratch the surface of enabling people to change the way they work, but not necessarily change the work itself. Indeed as John Tropea (@johnt) suggests the greatest natural adoption of these tools is using them to work around existing business processes. Creating Enterprise 2.0-class software that can fundamentally change business models and operations is a whole different beast.
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How to Manage Outside Innovation
The leading question
Should companies organize outside innovation through collaborative communities or competitive markets?
Findings* Communities are useful when an innovation problem involves cumulative knowledge, continually building on past advances. Markets are effective when an innovation problem is best solved by broad experimentation.
* In general, communities are more oriented toward the intrinsic motivations of external innovators (the desire to be a part of some larger cause, for instance), whereas markets tend to reward extrinsic motivations (such as through financial compensation).-
The leading question
Should companies organize outside innovation through collaborative communities or competitive markets?
Findings
- Communities are useful when an innovation problem involves cumulative knowledge, continually building on past advances. Markets are effective when an innovation problem is best solved by broad experimentation.
- In general, communities are more oriented toward the intrinsic motivations of external innovators (the desire to be a part of some larger cause, for instance), whereas markets tend to reward extrinsic motivations (such as through financial compensation).
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Markets or Communities? The Best Ways to Manage Outside Innovation
According to Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani, Boeing’s approach is an excellent example of how not to manage external innovation. The right way to do it is the subject of an article in the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review by Lakhani and collaborator Kevin J. Boudreau (London Business School), « How to Manage Outside Innovation » (free registration required).
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The solution then is to connect with external innovators and invite them to participate with you on your critical problems. Of course, the Internet and the massive reduction in communication and computation costs have made accessing external innovators a much easier task than what was possible 10 or 15 years ago
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More practically, working with outside innovators does not mean that all the « keys to the kingdom » have to be given away. Instead, firms can become intelligent about selectively revealing core issues in ways that their IP is protected. Firms like Procter & Gamble and IBM have learned to do this€”others can learn as well.
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An important element in P&G’s effort was to create an infrastructure for external innovation that would enable the various business units to access the outside world. For established firms, CEO interest and commitment is necessary to make this happen.
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Boeing failed on two critical counts. One of the key tenets and advantages of external innovation is that you have access to multiple parallel approaches to solve the same problem.
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Second, my read of the situation from media reports is that Boeing kept a very long arm’s-length relationship with suppliers. So problems that came up with various modules were not recognized until much later.
How to Use Interns In Your Social Programs
While they’re certainly heavy adopters (our data proves this) €“it’s not limited to the youth only, take for example this report I did on the active Boomers. Using low cost interns are critical in getting an often unfunded skunk-works project is a good way to get the program up to speed in house €“but relying on them for strategic corporate communications is a risk.
In Sense-making with PKM I described some personal knowledge management processes using various web tools. The overall process consists of four internal actions (Sort, Categorize, Retrieve, Make Explicit) and three externally focused ones (Connect, Contribute, Exchange). Personal knowledge management is one way of addressing the issue of TMI (too much information).
Serious Games : Le Loyalist College constate 30% d’amélioration avec Second Life
Linden Labs, l’éditeur de Second Life, vient de publier une étude de cas sur le Loyalist College, une université canadienne, qui, entre autre, forme des douaniers. Selon l’Université, l’utilisation de Second Life comme outil de simulation et de formation, aurait permis d’augmenter les succès aux examens de 30%.
Tackling Enterprise 2.0 Resistance
There are three key reasons why people resist changes in technology.
1) Internal factors to the person or group – where it targets reactions like “People resist all change; People with analytic cognitive styles accept systems; while intuitive thinkers resist them”
2) Application or technical factors – if its a crappy system, people will resist it.
3) Interaction factors – where the new application or system would change the balance of power in organisations and people who are threaten by it would resist it.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.