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A couple of weeks back I (Gary Hamel) provided you with a synopsis of Vineet Nayar's new book, "Employees First, Customers Second," which has been recently published by Harvard Business School Press. In it, Vineet, CEO of HCL Technologies, talks about the progress his company has made in making managers more accountable to those on the front lines. Having posted my summary, I invited you to submit your questions to Vineet, and many of you did, along with plenty of piquant comments. Herewith, Vineet's reply. He begins by providing a bit of context, and then takes on a few of the most-asked queries.

In this white paper, we introduce the concept of Business Interaction Management (BIM). We explore the reasons that make that there is a need for a better understanding and mastering of such expertise and we position it against better-known disciplines such as Business Process Management (BPM).

Business process management in open environments remains a stubborn and important challenge. In open environments, autonomous organizations having heterogeneous information systems interact in an ever-evolving manner. The nature of the contractual relationships among such organizations has a significant bearing on the modeling of the business processes in which they participate. Conventional approaches are not suitable for open environments because (1) they lack support for modeling and management of contracts among organizations, (2) the modeling abstractions they offer do not afford crucial software engineering desiderata such as reuse, refinement, aggregation, and verification, and (3) they fail to provide the designers with guidelines on adapting the models should the underlying requirements change.\n\nWe propose a novel approach for engineering interorganizational business interactions. Contractual relationships are modeled via commitments and the interactions for enacting the contracts are captured via the modular abstraction of protocols. Relative to how organizations value the various terms of the contracts and how the contracts are played out via protocols, safety and benefit of the contracts are reasoned about. A protocol specifies rules that govern the interactions among the organizations. Protocols can be published to a repository, shared, reused, refined, and aggregated. We propose a methodology-Amoeba-that guides software designers in the face of evolving requirements on how the protocols and contracts can be adapted.

I can't tell you how many companies I have worked with that have encouraged or tolerated a large degree of geographic dispersal among employees and management teams. "We're virtual, and proud of it," one told me. "It doesn't matter where you live anymore," many employees of virtualized companies have argued. "We travel all the time anyway," has been another frequent mantra.\n\nBut I recently encountered a company that is moving the other way. Eclipsys makes software for healthcare providers. The company's headquarters is in Atlanta. Last week, it changed CEOs. The previous CEO, Andrew Eckert, lived in Silicon Valley. By all accounts, he did a good job in the role, and the company has been doing well. However, the board of directors felt that the company couldn't be managed successfully from afar, and held discussions with Eckert about moving to Atlanta. He was committed for both family and career reasons to stay in California, however, and declined to move. The board decided to change leaders, and Philip Pead, who had previously headed and sold a healthcare software company in Atlanta, got the nod as the new CEO. Pead had moved to Miami, but is returning to Atlanta to run the company.

DT Communications is the largest and leading agency in China and Asia with the focus in digital strategies. With offices operating across Asia Pacific regions, DT team is specialized in the domains of corporate strategy, public relations, event management, digital monitoring and marketing.

About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

Today's networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created. The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness. The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

BPM is hot, but has some limitations and deficiencies. In this presentation, we explore the need for a more interaction-focused approach that we call Business Interaction Management (BIM)

As high-tech supply chains increase in complexity, they become harder to manage. Collaboration between OEMs, suppliers, and retailers is the answer.

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.

I can't tell you how many companies I have worked with that have encouraged or tolerated a large degree of geographic dispersal among employees and management teams. "We're virtual, and proud of it," one told me. "It doesn't matter where you live anymore," many employees of virtualized companies have argued. "We travel all the time anyway," has been another frequent mantra.

BPM (Business Process Management) has been a hot item over the past years. Still, most of the basic concepts of BPM have their roots in production and supply chain environments where repetitive, standardised processes prevail. Unfortunately, today's business environment has evolved towards a networked knowledge economy where processes exhibit far greater complexity and variability. This briefing is a pleading for a more interaction-focused BPM approach.

In order to suit the best pr agency type, a firm requires meeting certain categories. Apart from being an efficient service provider and a great professional pursuit/ skills, the company should maintain consistency in meeting deadlines also.

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It's one of my favorite events, primarily because so many online friends attend from around the world and I enjoy their company. Despite overwhelming good will among participants, the conference exposed gaps between expectations and reality that continue to plague the Enterprise 2.0 world.

"Especially we, people with an IT-background, live too much with the illusion that we can capture our reality in bits. Unfortunately, what we are capturing is only a poor representation of a far deeper and far more complex reality."