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The average life expectancy of a human being in the 21st century is about 67 years. Do you know what the average life expectancy for a company is? Surprisingly short, it turns out. In a recent talk, John Hagel pointed out that the average life expectancy of a company in the S&P 500 has dropped precipitously, from 75 years (in 1937) to 15 years in a more recent study. Why is the life expectancy of a company so low? And why is it dropping? Many of these companies are collapsing under their own weight. As companies grow they invariably increase in complexity, and as things get more complex they become more difficult to control. The secret, I think, lies in understanding the nature of large, complex systems, and letting go of some of our traditional notions of how companies function.

The customer-centered company needs to make its products interactive, train its people for co-creative dialogue, redesign its physical places for two-way interactions, and open up the architecture of its digital sites to other processes and content that the company doesn't control. Nike puts a sensor in its shoes that lets runners track their runs and has a web platform where exchange data with others. Starbucks encourages a dialogue across all its stakeholders through the highly popular mystarbucksidea.com website. 3M invites its B2B customersto co-create new products with its R&D people live in their corporate labs. Apple invites third parties to develop new applications for its iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Companies are generally unprepared for this transformation to experience co-creation. Most product development groups continue to design non-interactive products. Company people in call centers and company stores still generally follow company narratives. Most corporate IT departments and suppliers are trained in one-way project-management techniques incompatible with true engagement-platform development. Herein lies the transformational challenge customer experience managers will face as they become customer-experience co-creators.

Has email become the new fax machine? Thierry Breton, Atos Origin CEO and Chairman, would have you believe so. Following through with a promise made earlier this year to eliminate email use among company employees, Breton plans to move beyond email within the next eighteen months and initiate a communication policy based on instant messaging and social media sites. As Atos Origin is a major international information technology company, the decision to abandon email has the potential to influence other companies' methods of communication among employees.

Guest Blogger How Zappos makes social media a part of its company culture By Guest Blogger on January 10, 2011 | 1412317 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F2011%2F01%2F10%2Fhow-zappos-makes-social-media-a-part-of-its-company-culture%2FHow+Zappos+makes+social+media+a+part+of+its+company+culture2011-01-10+13%3A32%3A19Guest+Bloggerhttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F%3Fp%3D14123 * * Share94 * * * Email * * Share94 * * * Email This post was written by SmartBrief technology editor Susan Rush. When it comes to social media, Zappos.com just gets it. Social media is not just a business strategy, it should be part of the culture, said Zappos' Thomas Knoll during the "Social Media in Action: Philosophies, Strategies and Tactics That Consistently Win" panel discussion at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Friday. Knoll said too much emphasis is often put on the "media" part of social media, adding that he is "a much bigger fan of the social part." The goal of social media is to connect and build relationships with customers.

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The label "User experience design" emerged in order to combat the small-mindedness of design for technology that was prevalent in the early 90s. During the technological boom of the last 20 years, with the emergence of the Web, prevalence of computers in all aspects of our lives, and the increasing complexity of the things we are building, "user experience" has been a helpful term in that it continually reminded us to think beyond whatever narrow thing we're considering at the time, and to consider the entire user's experience. And now, in 2012, with Apple, Inc. having the largest market capitalization of any company in the world, and an endless stream of CEOs and pundits talking about the importance of user experience, I suspect the phrase "user experience design" is no longer necessary, and could even be harmful. Harmful because it suggests that the only folks who need to worry about user experience are the designers, when in fact companies need to treat user experience no different than they treat profitability, or corporate culture, or innovation, or anything else that's essential for it's ongoing success. The companies that succeed best in delivering great experience are those that have it as an organization-wide mindset.

Interesting research from McKinsey suggests that companies using social media or "collaborative Web 2.0 technologies" are achievingt higher profits. Read more: http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/01/10/companies-using-social-media-are-making-more-money-says-mckinsey/#ixzz1Aq7IXm5E

Believe it or not, one thing that predicts how well a CEO's company performs is the width of his face. CEOs with wider faces, like Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, have better-performing companies than CEOs like Dick Fuld, the long-faced final CEO of Lehman Brothers. That's the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built. One challenge, which isn't new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you're looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I'm increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web. What is social proof?  Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It's also known as informational social influence.

"Small companies might turn to an out-of-box ESN like Salesforce (Chatter), while larger companies buy an ESN platform and then customize it to fit their needs.  But one of the biggest problems with ESN's right now is that developers and trainers don't account for culture."

"Courtesy of a plethora of very irked Yahoo employees, here is the internal memo sent to the company about a new rule rolled out today by CEO Marissa Mayer, which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely to relocate to company facilities. "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home," reads the memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses. "We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together." Painfully awkward as this is phrased - I might have used "being present together" - it means every Yahoo get to your desks stat!"

"Employers are increasingly using Facebook to screen job applicants and weed out candidates they think have undesirable traits. But a new study from North Carolina State University shows that those companies may have a fundamental misunderstanding of online behavior and, as a result, may be eliminating desirable job candidates."

Nowadays, goes the theory, innovation is supposed to be constantly improving everything the company is about. Is the theory right, or do the experiences of companies reveal something different?

"Survey results revealed engineers' chief concern to be fear of exposing critical company intellectual property (IP), with 58.5 percent of respondents citing security as their primary hesitation. Loss of productivity was a worry for 40.1 percent of respondents, while 29.3 percent said company policy precluded them from frequenting social networking sites on the job."

"Our goal at Zappos is to inspire -- not motivate -- employees to treat each other like family. For example, most Zappos employees when they leave the office leave to hang out with other Zappos employees. That's behavior you can't force upon employees. They actually have to want to do it." "Many companies are focusing on the current quarter or current year at best. The good news is that information is moving faster and faster and companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. As a result, the lag time between brand and culture is becoming less and less, so in the long run I think the 'good guys' will win."

It's easy for early adopters and social media enthusiasts to get caught up in the latest and greatest tool available but many companies are still seeking a basic foundation. According to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, only 12 percent of companies surveyed felt their organizations were using social media effectively.

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media. The results are part of Capgemini's Executive Outsourcing Survey, and follows the firm's launch of its social media management service. Harris surveyed 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies. More than half say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64% of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74%) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the social Web.

None of the top 100 companies to work for block social media access at the office, reports Erin Lieberman Moran, senior VP at the Great Place to Work Institute. Learn more about why employees should be trusted.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome. Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement.