Business Interaction Management

There's an orthodoxy in Enterprise 2.0 circles about how you're supposed to run an implementation. The orthodoxy goes something like this: Start with small-scale pilots, define your business objectives, watch the pilots closely, evaluate their success, make a go/no-go decision. (A good recent articulation of this view is in Chris McGrath's post on 8 Tips for a Successful Social Intranet Pilot.)

About one month after the release of our Shift Index report, one question that keeps coming up is whether we can offer a succinctly define what the Big Shift is that our Shift Index seeks to measure.

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.

More than ever, Enterprise 2.0 is the talk of the town. However, the discussion remains difficult due to a continuing bias towards tools and technology. Therefore, an attempt for a real look at the internals of Enterprise 2.0, the dark forces of collaboration.

Social media is most transformative when used inside the company, says Web 2.0 expert Leon Benjamin - and the implications are far reaching...

12 Rules For Bringing 'Social' To Your Business\n\nRarely do I take a negative viewpoint on new developments, especially in technology. But lately, with the seemingly runaway rise of highly successful social networks like Facebook and Twitter, it's become clear that adding the word "social" to virtually any product or service has become the current marketing trend du jour, often to the detriment of the consumers of those offerings.

Today's networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

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.

The talk of heterarchy is taking me back to Gerard Fairtlough's book on The Three Ways of Getting Things Done (hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy) - but this mention of systemic organisations leads neatly to Bill Tate's new book on systemic leadership in the systemic organisation.

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 our last post, we discussed talent development as an operational challenge. This time around we'll explore how the organization itself needs to change so that it develops a talent edge.

In recent posts we've described a massive institutional transformation that will occur as part of the big shift: the move from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The core questions we all need to address are: who will drive this transformation? Who will be the agents of change? Will it be institutional leaders from above or individuals from below and from the outside of our current institutions?

Eight emerging trends are transforming many markets and businesses. Executives should learn to shape the outcome rather than just react to it.

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Over the past years, the customer has moved to pole position. Customers are no longer passive participants in the sales process but now dictate the rules. Experience creation is the associated buzzword. However, there are also other needs...

It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?

Mastering value creation in the knowledge economy demands an appreciation for the pivotal role of intangible capital and a thorough understanding of network dynamics.