• 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?”

  tags: innovation, knowledge, customers

  • 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.
  • 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?”
  • Make a regular habit of asking questions such as, “Is this our view, or the view of our target customer?”

• 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.

  tags: management, leadership, salespeople, sales, connect, motivation

• 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.

  tags: humanresources, employees, engagement, behaviors, management, authority, empowerment

• 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.

  tags: socialmedia, strategy, framework, marketing, communication, engagement

• 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.

  tags: cisco, enterprise2.0, management, leaderhip, decisionmaking, appraisals, communities

  • 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.

• 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.

  tags: communication, message, corporatecommunication, feedback, fee

• 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.

  tags: socialmedia, margin, finance, bottomline, revenue, incomes

• 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.

  tags: enterprise2.0, socialcomputing, businessprocess, process

• 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.

  tags: enterprise2.0, process, businessprocess, socialcomputing

• 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).

  tags: innovation, openinnovation, crowdsourcing, communities, competitivemarkets, motivation, rewards

  • 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).

• 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).

  tags: innovation, market, communities, boeing, collaboration, suppliers, businessmodel, motivation, openinnovation, crowdsourcing

  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  tags: socialmedia, interns, technology, training, seniormanagement

• Creating your PKM processes

  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).

  tags: PKM, personalknowledgemanagement, connect, contribute, exchange, km

• 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%.

  tags: secondlife, learning, loyalistcollege, training, virtualuniverses

• When Culture Eats Enterprise 2.0 Strategy for Breakfast

  tags: enterprise2.0, strategy, culture, adoption, change

• 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.

  tags: enterprise2.0, adoption, change, technology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Dismantle Mistrust Between IT and the Business

  While these perceptions are typically not found at the top of IT or business organizations, they are prevalent in the trenches where the work gets done. And they need to be addressed. Without effective internal collaboration between IT and the rest of the business, technology will continue to be underutilized and the potential under-realized. How, for example, can companies leverage collaborative technologies when the teams tasked with exploiting the tools have difficulty collaborating?

  tags: IT, business, collaboration, trust, mistrust, learningcurve, relationship, problemsolving

• Managing beyond Web 2.0

  What does this development mean for your company? In effect, that its marketers are being replaced. As markets morph into Web 2.0 “conversations” and consumers gain much greater freedom to pursue their own interests, customers are doing things that online marketing managers don’t necessarily want—or expect—them to do.

  tags: web2.0, web3.0, innovation, LEAD, marketing, mckinsey, socialmedia

• 10 Ways to Attract Employees to Your Intranet

  Follow these 10 upgrades to increase employee traffic to your intranet—from the easiest to most difficult.

  tags: socialmedia, intranet, traffic, workflow, portals, adoption

• The Big Shift: Measuring the Forces of Change

  To help managers in this decidedly challenging time, we present a framework for understanding three waves of transformation in the competitive landscape: foundations for major change; flows of resources, such as knowledge, that allow firms to enhance productivity; and the impacts of the foundations and flows on companies and the economy. Combined, those factors reflect what we call the Big Shift in the global business environment.

  tags: knowledge, competition, knowledgeflow, ROA, flows, collaboration, problemsolving, innovation, creativity, socialmedia, productivity, ecosystem

  • The first, foundational wave in the Big Shift consists of the extraordinary changes in digital infrastructure that enable vastly greater productivity, transparency, and connectivity. Consider how companies can use digital technology to create ecosystems of diverse, far-flung users, designers, and suppliers in which product and process innovations fuel performance gains without introducing too much complexity.
  • The second wave involves the increasing movement of knowledge, talent, and capital. Knowledge flows—which occur in any social, fluid environment where learning and collaboration can take place—are quickly becoming one of the most crucial sources of value creation.

• Taming the Supply Chain beast, Enterprise 2.0 style.

  RollStream fixes specific problems – inefficiencies in the supply chain via Private Supplier Social Networks. Counting well known companies such as Walgreens, Owens & Minor, Johnson & Johnson and Tesco as customers, their SaaS solution services the partner relationship lifecycle for retailers, manufacturers and distributors. Business activity-focused capabilities cover partner on-boarding, compliance, performance management and dispute resolution.

  tags: enterprise2.0, supplychain, RollStream, socialnetworks, suppliers

  • one of the biggest opportunities to enterprises using such social computing technology is be able to to pry open the gates that lock out supply chain access to core processes such as product management, R&D, marketing, end customer support, etc.
  • First, no one knows the true power, limitations and opportunities for each component of a product better than the very folks who build them
  • Social Software can open up the lines of interaction beyond R&D, Procurement and Product Development, allowing suppliers to learn, first hand,  any pain felt by the end customer.
  • All that said, the use of collaborative software in this context can bring massive, measurable business benefit if its treated as a strategic initiative by enterprises

• Sustaining Software Innovation from the Client to the Web

  Despite the current strength and promise of the Internet software market, the future pace of growth and innovation is not assured. The principles of choice, opportunity, and interoperability were important in the growth of PC software and in the overall health of the information technology ecosystem, and these same principles will shape competition in Internet software, according to HBS professor Marco Iansiti

  tags: software, internet, interoperability, IT, innovation, internetsoftware, cloudcomputing

  • firms should allow consumers and partners to have a real choice between complementary products and services from otherwise competing firms
  • specifically, opportunity that is facilitated by giving developers platform access and the ability to innovate and build on platform technologies to create new products and services.
  • vendors should enable products to work together so customers can realize the full benefit of complementary products

• Twittergate: Most difficult part of Web 2.0 security is the human

  People have always been one of the weak links when it comes to breaches – time and time again. There are technical things that vendors proclaiming themselves as “E2.0″ solutions should be doing but that does not remove the need to raise these issues with employees and the responsibilities they have re: communication, information sharing, and collaboration using social tools and applications.

  tags: security, enterprise2.0, privacy, confidentiality, intellectualproperty

• How Integrated Are Your Customer Experiences?

  When I attended Forrester’s first Customer Experience Forum last month, I was struck by two themes that recurred through both the presentations on stage and the hallway conversations afterward.

  tags: customers, customerexperience, multichannel, management, silos, incentive, web, web2.0

  • “Web plus one” may be a perfect first step in defining a multi-channel experience for your customers, but it’s only that — a first step. In my work, I’ve seen the insights about customer behavior and psychology that were spearheaded (and funded) by web groups trickle out into the rest of the organization, informing customer experience efforts far from the web. By feeding the work of these other groups back into the web group’s work, the organization can take the next step toward developing a truly integrated customer experience strategy.
  • This is no small challenge, and it’s a rare organization that’s ready for it. Channel-specific organizational silos rarely have incentives to coordinate their activities, and in many cases have stronger incentives to go their own way. When those silos regularly compete for the same ever-shrinking slice of the budgetary pie, the cultural antipathy between them can be systemic. It takes politically savvy leadership with a strong mandate to erode those barriers.

• An alternative way to define IT project results

  IT projects need define a combine the engineering work to be done and the results that they create. Doing so requires more than giving the project a business based name. Here are a few steps for an alternative way to define an IT project.

  Combining these three ideas, when companies pay to execute a project, it’s not the project they want, it’s the result. They want more revenue generating customer relationships, not processes around a CRM system or even the capability to look up customer names. What they want is the result.

  tags: IT, results, project, ITproject, business, businessneed, control, productivity, visibility, engagement, customervalue, finance, ROI

  • First, companies don’t pay for activities, they pay for results. As explains in the blog post http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2009/06/30/activities-vs-results—the-difference-makes-all-the-difference/From this post. 

    Second, those results come from changing capabilities which are a more powerful definition of the business. So it’s the capability people want. 
http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2009/07/02/capability-is-more-powerful-than-process/

  • Results can be defined in the following ways: 


• Breakdown: The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web

  Consider this a supplement to my latest report on “How Companies Should Organize for Social Computing“. I continue to get questions from clients, and have spent time with more large brands are connecting with customers. Diving in further, I’ve noticed that there are three ways that companies allow employees to participate. Update: On a related note, I gave my thoughts to CNBC about the roles of social within corporations.

  tags: socialmedia, socialweb, employees, policy, brand, culture

• Using prizes to spur innovation

  Moreover, the role of prizes is changing: nearly 80 percent of those announced since 1991 have been designed to provide incentives for specific innovations rather than to reward excellence in general. An understanding of the characteristics of effective prizes and of how they are evolving would be useful for not only philanthropists but also public- and private-sector players hoping to harness their potential for innovation.

  tags: prize, rewards, innovation, philantropics, socialbenefits, nonprofits

• The End of Rational Economics

  Your company has been operating on the premise that people—customers, employees, managers—make logical decisions. It’s time to abandon that assumption.

  tags: economy, rationality, rationaleconomy, behavioraleconomy, employees, customers, collaboration, teamwork

• The Ultimate Community Management FAQ

  tags: communitymanagement

• A Year @Ford – Part 1

  Ultimately, Ford’s social media strategy looked something like this:

  Humanizing the company by connecting Ford employees with our stakeholders, allowing them to connect with each other when appropriate, and providing value in the process.

  tags: ford, socialmedia, marketing, strategy, twitter

• «La vocation des produits TIC est de générer des gains de productivité»

  L’immatériel constitue aujourd’hui un enjeu incontournable pour l’ensemble de l’économie. A en croire certains, les actifs immatériels ont un rôle non négligeables en termes de croissance. C’est la raison pour laquelle nous aimerions approcher avec vous le profil macroéconomique de cette «nouvelle» économie de l’immatériel.
  Tout d’abord, si vous me le permettez, il est nécessaire de clarifier les définitions et les différents concepts dont on parle, et avec lesquels tout le monde n’est pas forcément familier.

  tags: intangible, intangibleassets, growth, knowledgeeconomy, productivity, competition, knowledge, IT, valuechain, innovation

  • Dans la «knowledge economy», le savoir et la production intellectuelle deviennent des inputs de production, la matière première, mais également l’output de cette nouvelle catégorie d’industries (en d’autres termes, on produit du savoir, ou des œuvres de l’esprit, avec d’autres savoirs ou œuvres de l’esprit). Tout cela correspond à de l’information «numérisable» qui peut être «traitée» par les TIC.
  • La nouvelle économie est plus difficile à définir. Elle traduit l’impact des TIC et de la knowledge economy sur les processus productifs, la réorganisation des chaînes de valeur et on pense bien entendu que cette réorganisation des chaînes de production s’est basée sur des gains de productivité.
  • Dans l’économie de l’immatériel, les coûts fixes sont très importants, et les coûts marginaux quasi-nuls, ce qui engendre des rendements croissants et des économies d’échelle
  • L’économie de l’immatériel est aussi caractérisée par l’existence d’externalités. En effet, l’utilité sociale tirée du savoir est bien supérieure à son utilité individuelle
  • Ainsi, le savoir devient plus que jamais un élément de la concurrence. Il y a donc une relation entre le degré de concurrence et celui de l’innovation.
  • D’autre part, si on pense que les TIC représentent une révolution industrielle, la vocation des produits TIC est d’entrer dans les entreprises et de générer des gains de productivité. Or, l’Europe (en général, mais il y a des pays qui font exception, notamment en Europe du Nord) reste en retard sur le plan de sa dynamique de productivité. Sur les raisons de ce retard, il y a un débat entre économistes, et deux écoles s’affrontent.
  • La deuxième école est plus pessimiste. Elle met en effet l’accent sur les conditions qu’il a fallu pour que ces gains de productivité se matérialisent. Sans réorganisation des processus productifs, rien ne peut se produire.
  • Or, à ce jour, les statisticiens ne savent pas encore effectuer avec exactitude ce genre de calculs. On se contente pour l’instant d’évaluer la production des branches TIC, sans pouvoir vraiment mesurer le poids et l’impact sur l’économie de ces secteurs producteurs de TIC

• “Les jobs qu’occuperont nos futurs diplômés n’existent pas encore”

  Le College californien a repensé son approche pédagogique pour tenir compte de la plus grande versatilité de l’économie moderne: “Il y a 20 ans, un diplômé d’université avait entre 2 et 3 jobs différents dans sa vie. Les diplômés d’aujourd’hui travailleront dans 7 à 10 ans dans des jobs qui n’existent pas encore aujourd’hui. Notre but est de préparer cette nouvelle génération de façon à ce qu’elle soit capable de se remettre perpétuellement en question”

  tags: otiscollege, education, jobs, art, creativity, jobdesign

• Towards a diagnosis of an enterprise 2.0

  In brief, it is suggested that the main objective of a 2.0 business is to generate spaces in which people can realize their personal projects on a collective basis: a distributive network that encourages new relations without being bound by centralized decision-making and in which those on the periphery are just as important as those in the middle.

  Some time ago we designed this chart to make a diagnosis for an Argentinian top telecommunications company, in which we aimed to survey 400 top managers about this topic, and we share our conclusions with you.

  tags: enterprise2.0, diagnosis, socialenterprise

• Enterprise 2.0 – Enter the dark force -

  So, the main problem in the past Enterprise 2.0 debate is likely a lack of systems thinking. We do not look at the complete picture. We do not articulate clearly enough how causes and effects are linked to each other. Consequently, our view on the phenomenon remains incomplete and we do not see some of the obvious reasons that make that Enterprise 2.0 is not the homerun we were hoping for.

  tags: enterprise2.0, adoption, collaboration, system, systemthinking, systemic

• Web 2.0 in the Enterprise 2.0

  And the most successful projects have at least two things in common: They were built with a key business process in mind, and predicting their ROI was not part of the equation.

  tags: enterprise2.0, businessprocess, culture, ROI

• Young workers push employers for wider Web access

  Ryan Tracy thought he’d entered the Dark Ages when he graduated college and arrived in the working world.

  His employer blocked access to Facebook, Gmail and other popular Internet sites. He had no wireless access for his laptop and often ran to a nearby cafe on work time so he could use its Wi-Fi connection to send large files.

  Sure, the barriers did what his employer intended: They stopped him and his colleagues from using work time to goof around online. But Tracy says the rules also got in the way of legitimate work he needed to do as a scientific analyst for a health care services company.

  tags: generationy, facebook, socialnetworks, worktime, web, access

  • That’s what Joe Dwyer decided to do when he started Chicago-based Brill Street & Co., a jobs site for young professionals. He lets his employees use social networking and has found that, while they might spend time chatting up their friends, sometimes they’re asking those same friends for advice for a work problem or looking for useful contacts.

    “So what seems unproductive can be very productive,” Dwyer says.

  • But that also means many companies are still figuring out their online policies and how to deal with the blurring lines between work and personal time — including social networking, even with the boss.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.