Bookmarks du 09/27/2008

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