Are customers more reliable than employees ?

Some call it crowdsourcing, open innovation, participative innovation, distributed innovation, sometimes (and that how things should end) it’s a part of an ongoing improvement approach, or of a social crm one but one thing is sure : businesses are aware they have to co-built, invent et reinvent things with their wider ecosystem : clients, employees etc, even if many questions remain as for implementation.

In practical terms, there a some usual questionings like  :

- I’ve 30 000 employees who know my company and my products so why should I take the risk of opening to the outside world ? We are numerous enough like that.

- do I have to make internal and external work together ? Should I put them in watertigh bubbles ?

The truth is while businesses that adopt such strategies do it with a purpose, participants, regardless to their sincerity, may  unconsciously be pursuing personal goals that may differ from the corporate ones. It does not matter as long as companies are aware of that and act in the proper way.

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A socialnomics Manifesto

I rencently mentioned the word “socialnomics“. Whatt’s the interest ? In an interconnected world (not only by the net…a world were everything can impact everything, it’s essential to understand the context to define the systems (enterprise, project, organization, management) we have to implement. So let’s try to summarize things.

- the world is full of stakeholders. You already knew for your shareholders, your employees. For your partners and clients too. Now even your non-clients are a part of the game, they all have expectations, they all thave things to say about your products, why they trust your or not, they can all be the cause of a mass reaction that may impact your business, either positively or negatively.

- stakeholders matter as much as shareholders : it becomes harder everyday to satisfy the ones while neglecting the others. Worse, sometimes you have to listen to the first to satisfy the second.

- value is a flow. It does not self generate in the till or when a contract is signed but though a flow (many people already got that) that has its source outside the company, go through it and ends outside.

- localization is obsolete. People recently start to understand that interactions between the enterprise and its stakeholders did not depend anymore on where each was physically located but have moved online.  But “online” does not mean the corporate website anymore, it could be anywhere, depending on the blogs or social networks people use to read/use. Businesses can’t afford to wait for customers to join them, they have to join them where they are.

- the way business is done is at least as important for performance than operations. It’s a matter of values, of culture (what a company like Danone has identified and turned into a key asset years ago) but also (for how long ?) of ethics.

- The famous “to” in B2C, B2B…. and its “one way” connotationis being replaced by a bijective “with”.

- vertical hierarchy won’t disappear but articulates with an horizontal one. As a matter of fact the above mentioned flow does not advance by itself. It is fed by noise that has to be turned into information, then in decisions, then in actions that have to be monitored. It implies an horizontal decision making model in organizations that are structured for vertical decisions making only. So the organization has to be rethought in order not only to obey to “people from above” but also to “next door colleagues”.

- the value chain becomes social. Processes too.

- la chaine de valeur devient “sociale”, les processus également.

- in an information econmy, the only things that businesses can value is what the public can’t create alone, without them.

- what matters in communication (both internal or external is not how much information is pushed but the level of gained attention.

That won’t go without some challenges such as :

- implementboth the process and the “human factors” that will help to embed stakeholder’s creativity and knowledge into products, services, operations.

- manage employee’s schizophrenia. They are a part of the ecosystem, of the stakeholders, but often have radically opposite behaviors depending on whether they wear their corporate or their customer suit.

- rethink the enterprise, still as a production driven organization, but not as a push engine anymore, rather as the industrial element of the market to market loop.

- offer only products, information, services that mass collaboration between internauts can not produce.

- separate the wheat from the chaff in all the social noise and not go to the opposite extreme what would be like a “social submission” with inconsistent actions and unreadable

chaine de valeur, création de valeur, Innovation, Management, marketing, parties prenantes, social crm, socialisation, socialnomics, valeur, .

Is Innovation an Affair of State ?

Innovate, Innovate ! You must innovate. That’s this year’s hit ! Even this crisis’ hit, since crisis and especially this one force us to review many certainties and reinvent many things we used to take for granted. Innovation is shown as being the enterprise’s call. Innover ! Il faut innover. C’est le tube de l’été, en tout cas celui d’une crise qui met à mal quelques certitudes et nous amène à revisiter nombre de choses que l’on croyait acquises. Et comme de bien souvent l’innovation pèse sur l’entreprise. C’est bizarrement lorsqu’elles en ont le moins les moyens que c’est d’autant plus vital qu’elles s’y mettent. Cela n’est pas sans quelques aspects positifs : tout d’abord les entreprises ouvrent leur leur innovation en impliquant leurs clients, leurs salariés, leur écosystème au sens large, ensuite elles comprennent que la prochaine fois que tout ira bien elles ne se reposeront pas sur leurs acquis et travailleront à se doter de quoi bien se tenir lors de la prochaine période de vache maigre.

Mais l’entreprise ne fait pas que ce qu’elle veut. Elle évolue dans un cadre économique et législatif dont elle ne maitrise pas tous les éléments. C’est là qu’entre (ou non d’ailleurs) l’état dont le rôle est de créer les conditions de la sortie de crise. Au départ cela commence par des exhortations : “Nos entreprises doivent innover”. Ce qui fait une belle jambe au patron de PME empêtré dans le marasme économique et une législation parfois peu facilitatrice. Cela se poursuit souvent par des financements. Des enveloppes distribuées plus ou moins à propos, pas forcément aux bonnes personnes et pour les bons projets, et en fonction d’un processus administratif qui fait que les fonds sont débloqués au milieu de la crise suivante. Quoi qu’il semble que coté français on s’améliore de ce coté là (même si le caractère purement “web” des initiatives en cours tendent à négliger les efforts dont ont besoin des industries plus traditionnelles).

Et ensuite ? Besoin de coordonner, d’actions sectorielles spécifiques. Car on ne parle pas que de financer le développement de nouveaux produits (il est d’ailleurs souvent trop tard). On parle de nouveaux produits, mais de nouveaux business models, de se donner les moyens de créer et explorer de nouveaux marchés, de nouveaux modes de travail.

Le problème de l’innovation c’est que cela relève de l’économie, mais également des PME, des grandes entreprises. Un peu de recherche. Un brin de fiscalité. Sans parler des secteurs d’activités qui ont un ministre de tutelle dédié : transports, éducation, santé, TIC, industrie, et pourquoi pas d’ailleurs sport et culture.

Bref, repenser la manière dont on fait les choses n’est pas une affaire simple. empiète sur de nombreux territoires sans qu’on sache en définitive qui a leadership, coordonne, et donne le ton aux autres. On peut créer une taskforce dédiée, mais le caractère nouveau et provisoire de ce type d’organismes nuit souvent à son autorité. Ou alors donner un grand coup de balais dans l’existant histoire de matéraliser ces priorités nouvelles et rappeler à ceux qui en ont la charge ce qu’on attend d’eux.

Jamais en retard en terme de modernité, la Lituanie a décidé de transformer son ministère de l’économie en Ministère des affaires, de l’Innovation et du travail. Pas un simple changement de nom mais une véritable restructuration.

Bon…et chez nous il se passe quoi ?

Will you have to throw your marketing outside of the window ?

McKinsey recently issued a report entitled Managing beyond web 2.0 which is about constraints businesses are meeting in a connected world. Those who relied on the title to pounce on it may have been very disappointed since it’s more about the realtionships between businesses and their ecosystems than about internal management issues. But that’s not because I didn’t found the title relevant that the content wasn’t worth. Those who are used to the subject may not learn lots of things but the McKinsey stamp will attract conservative people that are often reluctant to web 2.0 things and will help others to provide their superiors with a document that will be considered as a more trusted source than a blog.

The starting point is known by everyone. In a world that gets more interconnected everyday, consumers do things on thgeir own that are totally out of marketing people’s control and do not always please them. They make their own opinion on a produc, give pieces of advice the one to the other, share their positive and negative feedbacks, propose ideas to improve products or to conceive new ones. Consequence : some say nice things about a product, passionate communities are forming. But the opposite also happens.

The truth is that marketing depts do not control what’s said about products anymore. Worse, people don’t listen to marketers anymore. Hence the consequence (hastily ?) drawn by the report : marketing is being replaced. Consequence : rather than keeping pushing messages, businesses should listen. That’s not without reminding me of the community management debate. Those who are passionate about this issue should read how Xavier Comtesse revisited the value chain, taking into account the 2.0 paradigm and the concept of “consumActor” (detailed here) and very well illustrated by this chart.

Valuechain20

I won’t add anything about ideagoras, crowdsourcing and similar things that have already been discussed a lot on this blog and all over the web. But it’s obvious everything is converging. One more example of business socialization.

McKinsey proposes a pragmatic model judiciously called LEAD (listen, experiment,apply,develop). By the way, it does not bring anything new to the abundant litterature on the topic. More, it has already been implemented by many businesses (P&G for instance). At the end, by pointing at marketing’s weaknesses, it’s the need for a re-invented innovation that’s highlighted.

Beyond my disagreement on the title, I don’t thing that the conclusion that has to be drawn from the report is the pointlessness of marketing. Marketing only has to be rethought regarding a value chain that should be coherent with today’s business context and highly involved in innovation processes (and idea sourcing) which are the the fuel that will power companies in the upcoming years. This is the needed shift from a logic of local push to a global pull one.

As for the conclusion that suggest businesses have to get prepared for web 3.0 I let you make your own opinion. Nobody knows how the future will look like, and since businesses are only starting to understand how to embrace web 2.0 without mistakes and unnecessary worryings, I find the injunction irrelevant, premature and superflous.

This document is not about internal issues. But drawing its consequences in terms of management would be an interesting exercise…and I’m sure McKinsey have its ideas about that.

Innovation : from a “OR” to an “AND” culture

What I can draw from this video is that what charaterize really innovatve companies is that they can find their way between assumptions that seem contradictory. They think in terms of “AND” instead of “OR”.

One may answer that always looking for compromises leads to solution that bring nothing, that choices have to be made and that’s the reason why people never chose : they’re afraid of making a wrong decision so making none is the best way to avoid failure.

I’m one of those who think that when two contradictory assumptions have to be taken into account, one or the other must be false. Or they rely themselves on false assumptions.

Example : having to climb up a high mountain vs. not being able to do any effort. This only on the only fact that, a priori, people take that a mountain must be climbed up on foot for grand. What about an helicopter ?  But everything starts with a false assumption that makes us think that a choice has to be made.

I wonder what would Steve Jobs think of that, since he teaches us to always keep a beginner’s mind.

How to integrate innovation in your organization…with your IT dept.

I’coming back on an article titled “Teaming Up to Crack Innovation Enterprise Integration” and issued in the Harvard Business Review in last november. It has many interests : it’s about the vital problematic of innovation, it shows this so-called innovation can only be distributed and rely on sharing, it shows how such principles can be put at work within companies and explain the role of IT.

• The principle

Growth rely on two factors : innovation (ability to propose new products that meet the maket’s expectation and conceive new processes and business models) and integration (ability to make separate entities work together in order to lower structural costs, higer overall production capacity and discover new opportunities).

• The constraints

Integration and innovation share a common point : they are not in most of corporate DNAs. Innovation because it breaks with traditional habits and is more often stifled than promoted, integration because it goes against local optimization that it tries to replace with a systemic approach.

More, because they suppose more exchanges and an increased work on information, these logics need a strong support from IT departments and yet the article mentions a survey that shows that if half the IT depts are in charge of integration and a third of innovation, very few of them are in charge of both.

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Managing in a downturn

The Alumni Network of the famous french “Ecole Polytechnique” issued a report on “how to manage in a downturn’. Here are a few excerpts :

• Urgency does not mean lack of vigilance : state of urgency makes people focus on short term which bad effects are know…on long term. Moreover, enterprise compartmentalization and a hard context lead to a strong deterioration of communiation. At last, blind faith in systems disconnects managers from reality.

• short term and lack of markers. The contractual short term logic destroys people’s markers and confidence disappears.

• Innovation is key to survive a downturn. But it will have to be cooperative and operated inside alliances, with partners.

• Intangible assets are a source of differencitation and development. Companies must identify therm and build their new strategies upon them, using new appropriate dashboards and indicators for this paradigm.

• Digital as a tranformation lever : companies underuse the capabilities new technologies offer and don’t reinvent themselves because of overcautiousness and fear of changing era.

• Maintening the links with the ecosystem in crisis time is very important, knowing that it’s a time of high customers volatilty and that the public opinion will try to analyze even the weakest signal. Mastering one’s communication and information will imply to use tools that allow this new form of transparent communication.

Web 2.0 tools to improve information readiness

Today, many opinions converge to admit two things :

• companies need to be more and and more reactive in order to run their traditionnal activities in a more and more complexe context, where foreseeability is very uncertain and where sharp competences and complex competences assembling are needed in a short range of time. Something like “special forces forces for special taks”, running in parallel with traditionnal activities which are companies common background operations.

• in order to match this need, adequate expertises and competences are needed.

We have no choice but to admit that high levels of performance are reached in legay and “institutionnalized” activities and the money that has been invested to improve many business processes often provided a ROI. Competencewise, we also have to admit they are really present within organizations. But, for what’s about building efficient adhoc self-organized teams, even if the need is identified it gets harder and harder to be successfull since more and more situations requires this way of doing things.

One reason is that what we call intellectual capital, if present, is not easily accessible and its owners can barely be identified. To improve things, experience and knowledge should be “findable” and “findability” can only come from putting it all in words because it’s (and will remain for years) the more efficient way of indexing and finding datas in an online network, the so-called online network being the only commons space shared by all employees in scattered companies. So people would be able to search the experience and, if they can’t find what they’re looking for, identify referent people they could contact and ask.

All this is nothing more than a matter of information and readiness.

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Is web 2.0 dead or is business replacing buzzyness ?

You must have felt this agitation that went through the blogosphere these last day, but that was also relayed by traditional medias. Web 2.0 is dead. The rumor didn’t start from this note from Michael Arrington but since he’s got a bigger loudhailer than most of the population his voice carried farer. Then hundreds if not thousands of people predicted the end of web 2.0.

I can’t see anything particularly cleaver when some people say that when the economy’s going through hard times, the more fragile companies may come off badly. Among those companies there’s no need to have a second sight to guess all those that operates on an emerging market may be concerned, which is the case for web 2.0 startups…but not only. Not enough to convince me of real soothsayer abilities, nor to applause such perceptiveness, knowing it’s easy to ring the alarm when the city is burning just when you’ve been knowing fire raisers were at work for a long time. Those who were pushing for “everything 2.0″ even without sense or business model, prefering the “buzzyness model” could wonder about their past analysis. They themselves killed “their” web 2.0, turning it into a hudge holdall where they put everything and anything. But once smoke will be gone, many interesting things will remain, the only things that value creation can rely on, that makes it possible to build real business models. For this reason, I see these troubled times we’re experiencing as a salutary stabilization phase. I’ll end with a comparison with our late web 1.0. Even if some babies were thrown with the bathwater, companies that adresses a real need, that delivered a real valuable service, survived the crisis and are still alive.

In brief, I’d rather rank the “web 2.0 is dead” buzzword in the “who lives on noise can only survive making more noise” category.

So, what’s about Enterprise 2.0 ?

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Innovation and cultural change : ID-ah at Bell Canada

A few months ago I wrote about my meeting with Rex Lee, a nice conversation during which we talked about what he implemented at Bell Canada, he showed me a few projects and, above all, he explained me the vision that was behind all that. Among those tools and projects was ID-ah ! , their ideas management system.

No need to repeat what I said in my former post. But I’m coming back to this topic because Rex just sent me thr pdf of an interview he gave to Business Digest. The document being for (paying) suscribers only I was about to make a short excerpt here when Rew finally get the authorization to publish it. So I relay it, hoping you’ll find it useful.L’article étant payant j’allais vous en faire un petit résumé lorsque Rex a eu l’autorisation de le publier. Je relaie donc en espérant que vous y trouverez votre bonheur.

Some thoughts before you start reading my favorite collaboration director…

• Company’s problems are not only company’s problems : they are everybody’s problems and everybody has to find solutions together.

• Governance is about aligning ideas with corporate issues and not about the presumption some people more be more revelant than others : someone from the IT dept may have very good ideas about marketing., his freedom of speech may not be restricted to IT isses.

• It’s essential to determine at the very beginning of the project what ideas would become. Here, people know best ideas will be presented to top managers. It gives credibility, it helps changing minds, and above all, it’s the evidence of a necessary transparence that improves motivation.

• Votes and “wisdom of crowds” are not enough. The most disruptive ideas seldom meet people’s attention. So they have to be identified “manally” and give them as many chances to be exploited than those that got the most voted ones.

• First of all it’s about cultural change, it needs leaders and it takes time to happen.

• Tools are important but they are the last step. It must not make forget the human side of the project. “don’t think that a technical solution can resolve a problem that’s fundamentally a human one;[...] it can take the organization’s pulse, but you need to go further to change the corporateculture to one of collaboration…being responsive to what [employees] have to say, and carrying out real actions”

• You may have noticed how we started with ideas management to end with collaboration. At first sight it may be surprising that a collaboraiton director may be so involved into innovation, creativity, problem solving. It’s because, and I had the confirmation of that during our conversation, Rex and I share the same vision according to which, today, collaboration is “finding together innovative solutions to problems”.

Enjoy your reading !

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