Social Business

How businesses use social technologies internally as well as externally is highly relevant in future markets as is the importance of business leaders’ understanding of new ways of working. McKinsey researchers believe the uplift in productivity through the use of social technologies could be as much as $1.3 trillion annually while other researchers from IBM, say this will not happen until structures, processes and cultures are transformed.  Below are links showing ideas and thoughts from leaders globally:

2016 Links:

Insead: Brain imaging Triggers Marketing Breakthroughs: “The holy grail of marketing – a universal predictor of customer behavious – may be closer than ever, thanks to recent advances in the field of neuromarketing”

2014 Links:

Washington Post – Zappos says goodbye to bosses: “The Las Vegas-based retailer is now going even more radical, introducing a new approach to organizing the company. It will eliminate traditional managers, do away with the typical corporate hierarchy and get rid of job titles, at least internally. The company told employees of the change at a year-end meeting, Quartz first reported.”

CMS Wire – Complexity, Competitive Advantage and Embracing the Intangible: “Studies suggest that the most effective way to ensure customer satisfaction is to have employees who give a darn and are empowered to act…  There’s another 20th century reality as well: complexity. Complexity is (a lot of things, some of them very precise, but for the purposes of this discussion …) the state of being which is either intrinsically impossible to understand by traditional rationalist methods, or where the cost or time involved in such analysis makes it impractical for the time being.”

Stowe Boyd – Zero Sum versus Humanism: What’s Wrong With Entrepreneurial Culture?: “I am going to try to not overgeneralize about the entrepreneurial community from this post by Mark Suster, the entrepreneur turned VC, but it’s hard not to, based on my experience in that world and his insistence on calling on the support of ‘every experienced operator in my inner circle’ to support some of the most zero sum economic arguments about business management and human motivations.”

November 2013 Links:

Booz.com – Culture’s Role in Enabling Organisational Change: “Culture is critically important to business success, according to 84 percent of the more than 2,200 global participants in the 2013 Culture and Change Management Survey. Findings also suggest strong correlations between the success of change programs and whether culture was leveraged in the change process—pointing to the need for a more culture-oriented approach to change.”

Cap Gemini – The Digital Advantage – How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry: “We decided to find out what fast-moving digital innovaitons mean for large traditional companies.  In two years of study covering more than 400 large firms (See About the Research), we found that most large firms are already taking action.  They are using technologies like social media, mobile, analytics and embedded devices to change their customer engagement, internal operations and even their business models.  But few firms have positioned themselves to capture the real business benefits.”

October 2013 Links:

Brian Solis.com – Social Business is Dead!  Long Live What’s Next!: “So while some of us are getting ready to attend the funeral for Social Business, many are pushing onward to what’s next. Whatever we end up calling it is not the important thing. What really matters is freeing every human asset to be free of fear, uncertainty and doubt so they may achieve their greatest potential in life and in work… Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is not to get caught up in the words, but to connect with each other and figure out how to re-imagine our broken corporations and set about trying to fix them. Fail fast, fail often and find the greatest success possible.” Chris Heuer

Accenture – From Talking to Transforming: Getting Real Value from Enterprise Collaboration Technology:   “New enterprise collaboration technologies can systematically lead to better decisions and higher productivity—if companies follow three strategies that get beyond talk to changing how people work.”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger – Reshaping Business and Capitalism for the 21st Century: “The basic premise behind the principle of shared value is that a company’s profitability and competitive position require the creation of both economic and social value, because the interests of the company and the health of the communities around it are mutually dependent on each other.  It says that you cannot view business value creation as being primarily about optimizing the short-term financial performance of the company and its shareholders, while ignoring the interests of customers and communities.”

Altimetergroup.com – The State of Social Business 2013: The Maturing of Social Media into Social Business: “In terms of Social Business maturity, most businesses are ‘intermediate’, with only 17% who are truly strategic in the execution of their social strategies”. 

Fast Co Design – 3 Ways Burberry’s CEO Will Impact Apple’s New Spaceship-Style Headquarters: “Beyond culture, of course, the organization of Apple’s new space is crucial to its success. Apple plans to house up to 14,200 employees at its circular, four-story building, a potential logistics nightmare. Ahrendts had to deal with a similar headache at Burberry.”

HR Magazine – Oracle President calls for HR to lead business:  “Oracle President Mark Hurd has called for HR to transform itself and start to lead and drive businesses.  He said that in the next 10 years HR would change ‘dramatically’ in the way it functioned, but this would hand it an opportunity to be at the core of how businesses operate.”

September 2013 Links:

BBC – How Going Boss Free Empowered the Games Maker: “Welcome to Flatland.  Imagine a company where everyone is equal and managers don’t exist. A place where employees sit where they want, choose what to work on and decide each other’s pay. Then, once a year, everyone goes on holiday together.  You have just imagined Valve.”

July 2013 Links:

Jeremiah Owyang – Collaborative Economy: Industry Stats: “My goal is to serve as an industry curator to advance our collective knowledge, research, and for my own personal understanding.  If you want an overview, with three business opportunities for corporations, read the full report on the Collaborative Economy Value Chain.”

Esko Kilpi – Social Business and Complexity: “Up to now, we have seen the world around us as systems that, we thought, could be described and understood by identifying rational causal links between things… Management thinking is based on the sciences of certainty…. Almost daily, we experience the inability of leaders to choose what happens to them, to their organizations – or to their countries. Things may appear orderly over time, but are inherently unpredictable. We live in a complex world.”

Joining Dots.com – Social Networks do not need Hierarchy: “Social media is one of the most democraticising developments within information technology. It enables people to circumvent traditional hierarchies. Why create new ones?“

MITSloan: The Executive’s Role in Social Business: “Executive commitment is essential when companies launch and grow social business initiatives. What’s more, social business is starting to change roles within the C-suite.”

June 2013 Links:

CIO.com – 10 Hot Big Data Startups to Watch: “Big Data startups are building viable products that target real-world pain points, and most of these Big Data new ventures are well-funded with solid management teams.  Here are 10 Big Data startups to watch”

Econsultancy – Digital transformation – the new Microsoft model?: “CEO Steve Ballmer has yet to make any official statements (at least at time of writing), but speculation is rife that the company are set to undergo a large-scale restructuring, in order to become, in  Ballmer’s own words, a ‘Devices and Services’ company.”

Microsoft – Microsoft Survey on enterprise social use and perceptions: “Businesses have to be agile to keep up with the competition.  And since communicating and sharing information with people is fundamental to the success of any business, many enterprises are taking measures to employ tools that can provide that extra edge.”

May 2013 Links:

Web-strategist.com – The next phase of social business is the collaborative economy: “Collaborative economy is next phase of social.  Social networks share ideas, yet collaborative economy shares products & services”

March 2013 Links:

Bloomberg Business Week – Tesco Monitors Employees With Motorola Armbands. “There’s a fine line between micromanaging and house arrest, and British grocery store chain Tesco seems determined to cross it. According to the Irish Independent, employees at the company’s Dublin distribution center are forced to wear armbands that measure their productivity so closely that the company even knows when they take a bathroom break.”

Harvard Business Review – The End of “Results Only” at Best Buy is Bad News“… Best Buy’s flexible work program is not just any flex policy, but the groundbreaking Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), one of the most innovative and celebrated examples of a company redesigning work to focus on results and boost performance through motivation-enhancing trust and autonomy. Under ROWE, corporate (non-store) employees had the freedom to work when and where they wanted as long as they got their work done”

February 2013 Links:

The Economist – Global Trends for 2013, A Top Ten for Business Leaders.  “The great power shift (Thomas W. Malnight and Tracey S. Keys)  The great global redistribution of economic and social power will continue over the next 12 months. Power will flow away from traditional institutions that have failed to deliver progress – especially governments and banks. It will flow towards communities and individuals, and also to businesses whose leaders understand and act on the big trends shaping our future.

ZDNet – A New Reality Between the CMO and CIO. “Summary: Today’s rapidly shifting marketplace is pushing business innovation and agility to new levels, while the rising primacy of digital engagement and all data related to it undergoes a tug of war between the CMO and CIO. How will businesses recalibrate these strategic roles for this new reality?”

OfficeInsight – This is not the Office of the Future. “It seems like we don’t have to wait more than a few days at a time before some or other organisation is making its own prognoses about how we will be working in the future. The thing these reports all share in common, other than a standardised variant of a title and a common lexicon of agility, empowerment and connectivity, is a narrow focus based on their key assumptions. While these are rarely false per se, and often offer extremely valuable insights, they also usually exhibit a desire to look at only one part of the elephant.”

WSJ – IBM Security Tool can Flag ‘Disgruntled Employees‘.  “A new International Business Machines Corp. security tool uses Big Data to help CIOs detect internal and external security threats in new ways—and can even scan email and social media to flag apparently “disgruntled” employees who might be inclined to reveal company secrets, according to Sandy Bird, chief technology officer of IBM’s security systems division.”

January 2013 Links:

Deloitte – The Millenial Survey 2013. “The findings endorse the importance of leadership and innovation and the impact business can have on society. This creates opportunities for business leaders – both individually and collectively – and for the long-term success of their businesses. Today’s leaders need to think very differently about their role and the expectations of business, if we are to capitalize on the opportunities being shaped by the Millennial generation.”

Gartner – Gartner says 80% of Social Business Efforts will not achieve intended Benefits through 2015. “Enterprise social networks will become the primary communication channels for noticing, deciding or acting on information relevant to carrying out work. However, Gartner, Inc. estimates that through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.”

YourBetterBusiness.co.uk – The Office Space of the Future. “Swarming – the way forward.  A recent report from Gartner Inc finds office-based work becoming steadily less routine and more characterised by a trend known as ‘swarming’ – whereby diverse groups of specialist professionals quickly convene, for a short flurry of activity around a specific objective, and then disperse (often pulled towards their next task in a different group).”

The Economist – Globalisation – Going Backwards.  “The world is less connected that it was in 2007.”

December 2012 Links:

21/11/12: Harvard Business Review – Etsy’s Hackathon for Good : “CEO Chad Dickerson isn’t satisfied. He’s committed to making Etsy a business with a higher purpose beyond profit. To that end, he’s helped Etsy become a Certified B Corporation — a new type of company which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.”

21/11/12: Harvard Business Review – New Research: How Employee Engagement Hits the Bottom Line: “Towers Watson found that companies with low engagement scores had an average operating margin just under 10 percent. Those with high traditional engagement had a slightly higher margin of 14 percent. Companies with the highest “sustainable engagement” scores had an average one-year operating margin of 27 percent.”

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