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"It's a common refrain in executive suites these days: "We need a new narrative." It's not enough any more to say "we make widgets." With changes happening so quickly from so many directions - competition, regulation, technology, talent, customer behavior - it's easy for one's story to become generic or outdated. You want a story that inspires employees, excites partners, attracts customers, and engages influencers. A story that is concise but comprehensive. Specific but with room to grow. One that defines the company's vision, communicates the strategy, and embodies the culture. The natural step is to give the assignment to an agency. Most branding firms will come back with a tagline and positioning statement. Most advertising agencies with creative treatments and marketing campaigns. Most PR firms with messaging and communication plans. These are useful tactics but aren't the kind of strategic narrative you are looking for. A strategic narrative is a special kind of story. It says who you are as a company. Where you've been, where you are, and where you are going. How you believe value is created and what you value in relationships. It explains why you exist and what makes you unique. This doesn't come out of the usual competitive landscape, customer interviews, and whiteboard sessions. It takes a different approach and a shift in thinking led by the leadership team. "

"Audit. Compliance. Team training. Process re-engineering. Every one of these activities requires that your team have accurate business process documentation in-hand to maximize success. Is it optional? Not really. For a variety of reasons, complex enterprises need to have a firm understanding of how they actually conduct business and "how things really work around here." And it needs to be written down in a way that your team, your auditors, your regulators, and your business analysts will understand and be able to use and customize for their intended purpose. Challenges. The problem is that generating and maintaining accurate business process documentation is a real pain because it's time consuming and difficult. The knowledge of the process has to come from business users and business analysts, whose time is expensive - and any time spent creating documentation takes them away from their primary mission of running the business. Even worse, once this hard-won information is captured, it can become out-of-date in a matter of days or weeks as business processes change over time. The cost of documenting your business processes can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs for consultants, interviewers, and document preparation - not to mention your team's opportunity cost which can be much greater. An Automation Path. If you've made it this far, it's because you're looking for a better way - and the good news is that automation provides today's most effective solution. With software for automated business process documentation, the business user turns on a process "capture" feature from their desktop toolbar when executing a business process in their enterprise application of choice, such as SAP or a web application. When the process is complete, they simply turn off the capture feature. Every business process function, keystroke, and transaction has been uploaded into the automation software. In this way, the softwar

"I've been exploring a growing list of web-based tools for the creation and management of what most would call 'documents' - assemblages of text, images, lists, embedded video, audio and other media - but which, are in fact, something quite different than the precursors, like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages documents. The big shift underlying these new tools is that they are not oriented around printing onto paper, or digital analogues of paper, like PDF. Instead, they take as a given that the creation, management, and sharing of these assemblages of information will take place nearly all the time online, and will be social at the core: coediting, commenting, and sharing are not afterthoughts grafted onto a 'work processing' architecture. As a result, I am referring to these tools - like the pioneering Google Docs, and newer entrants Dropbox Paper, Quip, Draft, and Notion - as 'work processing' tools. This gets across the idea that we aren't just pushing words onto paper through agency of word processing apps, we're capturing and sharing information that's critical to our increasingly digital businesses, to be accessed and leveraged in digital-first use cases. In a recent piece on Medium, Documents are the new Email, I made the case that old style 'documents' are declining as a percentage of overall work communications, with larger percentages shifting to chat, texting, and work media (enterprise social networks). And, like email, documents are increasingly disliked as a means to communicate. And I suggested that, over time, these older word processing documents - and the use cases that have built up around them - will decline. At the same time, I believe there is a great deal of promise in 'work processing' tools, which are based around web publishing, web notions of sharing and co-creation, and the allure of content-centric work management."