Innovation + Social Enterprise = Monopoly Profits, Dell
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Innovation + Social Enterprise = Monopoly Profits, Dell
- 1. Innovation + Social Enterprise = Monopoly Profits Jim Stikeleather
- 2. 2 Services Sources of profit and growth since the industrial revolution Supply & Demand Chains 6 Process Improvement Innovation
- 4. 4 Services Innovation is the process that takes new ideas and implements them in a way that creates value by solving unmet needs. New ideas + Forward thinking + Feasible + Viable + Valuable Not a marketing term Not invention Products and services Business model Processes model Operations Development Sales & Marketing
- 5. 5 Services With Innovation Plan Without Innovation Plan Business model and process Products&Services New Near to existing NewNear to existing Breakthrough Disruptive change BreakthroughIncremental Sustaining
- 6. 6 Services First you think about the future IDEATION INTERNAL RESOURCES IDEATION EXTERNAL RESOURCES DRAFT NEW PRODUCT CONCEPTS NARROW CONCEPTS UNDER CONSIDERATION OUTLINE FEATURES/ BENEFITS EXPOSE TO TARGET CUSTOMERS (QUALITATIVE) KILL CONTINUE REFINE ESTABLISH SUCCESS CRITERIA KILL TEST MARKET (NEW PRODUCT INCUBATOR) EXECUTIVE MANAGEMEN T REVIEW (Investment Committee) POST TEST MARKET EVALUATION DESIGN, DEVELOP & PILOT (Project Launched) FOR M TEA M DEFINE THE PROBLEM/ OPPORTUNITY EXPOSE TO TARGET CUSTOMERS FOR VOLUME ASSESSMENT (QUANTITATIVE) TEST MARKETING PREPARATION HIGH LEVEL REQUIRE- MENTS DEVELOP BUS CASE/OBTAIN APPROVAL TO PROCEED (Mgt Review) KILL CONTINUE REFINE FINAL ROLLOUT PLAN FINAL TIMELINE WAR GAMES EXECUTIVE GROUP REVIEW TRAINING KILL ROLL- OUT EVALUATION AND MEASUREMENT PLAN DEVELOPMENT AND INITIAL TIME LINE (Proj Request/Sizing) TURN OVER TO PRODUCT MANAGEMENT How far back depends on feedback received May require refinement of business case and financials Some, or all of these stages may not apply to smallerefforts, or those with low execution risk/low capital investment For large projects, or those requiring post-pilot review and approval, these stages will apply (e.g. Investment Committee level projects). Project Release Management Flow Begins (see next page) Project Lifecycle Project Lifecycle START Start Project End Project Convergent Thinking Divergent Thinking Analytic / Rational Quantitative / Sequential Constraint-driven / Objective Specific details Creative / Intuitive Qualitative / Subjective Possibilities / Holistic Conceptual abstractions
- 7. 7 Services Then you organize your thoughts IP, patents Insight Strategic Planning Frameworks Innovation for market challenges Innovation for customer & operational challenges Relative innovation Value challenges Foresight Scenarios Themes Signals, trends Reference Architectures Outcomes and Metrics R&D Standards, laws Invest Execute Plan of investigation Continual improvement Plan of intent Plan of record
- 9. 9 Services Innovation scorecard The right people / innovators DNA: • Don’t quite fit the establishment • Outsider • Questioning • Networking • Observing • Experimenting Common language
- 10. 10 Services Meet people’s needs Teach/support creativity Nurture passion Make the work matter Provide the time Renew, reflect, recharge Actively participate Engaged review Shape context Break processes Available Leadership role modeling Appropriate rewards and incentives
- 11. 11 Services Then you make things happen (Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization)
- 12. 12 Services Execution: a storm is coming… Enterprise 2.0 Management 2.0 Capitalism 2.0 Economics 2.0 IT 2.0 New game, new playing field, new rules, new players… Means innovation, flexibility, agility, and more…
- 13. 13 Services Welcome to the serendipity economy (or the world wide jam session) Image courtesy of Yoan Blanc - http://www.flickr.com/photos/greut/502095764/ http://danielwrasmus.com/default.aspx The process of creation is distinct from value realization Value realization is displaced in time from the act that initiated the value The measure of value requires external validation Value is not fixed and cannot be forecasted Looking at a network in the present cannot anticipate either its potential for value nor any actual value it may produce Serendipity may enter at any point in the value web, and it may change the configuration of the value web at any time http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/ http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/exhibitions/serendipity/
- 14. 14 Services Consilience, complexity and emergence… Cynefin Framework http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=NugRZGDbPFU&feature=endscreen
- 15. 15 Services Collaboration and Co-creation: Sur/Petition Customers, staff, partners, suppliers, competitors Sur/Petition – Moving Beyond Competition Competition, with its focus on what others are doing, is only the baseline for survival. “Sur/petition” focuses on value creation, going beyond traditional strategic competition to exploit the vast potential of “integrated values” that surround the purchase and use of products and services. de Bono, Edward, Sur/petition, Harper Collins, London http://www.digital-ecosystems.org/book/2006-4156_PROOF-DCS.pdf
- 16. 16 Services People – Humanities greatest resource Management – Humanities greatest invention Create Customers, Lower Transaction Costs, Overcome Economic Friction Planning to Preparation Directing to Mentoring Staffing to Engaging Controlling to Framing Division of Labor to Self Selection Unity of Command to Emergence of Direction Scalar Chain of Command to Dynamic Leadership Span of Control to Self Organization 16
- 17. 17 Services The Workforce New and Old – Not what it used to be…. http://www.theimaginationage.net/2010/01/smarter-work-data-visualizations.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc http://www.youtube.com/watch?src_vid=dk8UJ-JWg-o&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_593316&v=XCH4FrnLlls
- 18. 18 Services http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/the-state-of-enterprise-20/143 http://www.boostzo ne.fr/en/the-fractal- nature-of- entreprise-2-0/ The fractal organization and Enterprise 2.0
- 19. 19 Services Necessary Condition for Success: The Socially Enabled Enterprise http://moogsoft.wordpress.com http://blog.thecustomerframework.com/?Tag=socially+enabled+business 19
Editor's Notes
- Build a common definition of innovation. Dell’s position is that innovation is not restricted to new products and services but can occur with new business models and processes.Innovation in Business Model – There are multiple corporate examples in the notes below. Pick the one that would resonate the best with your customer.-----------------------------------------------------------Southwest Airlines developed an approach to the airline business unlike any of the airlines that were established when the company was founded, and has sustained its unique business model to become the most financially successful company in a highly troubled industry. One of the most interesting things about Southwest is that there isn’t much technology evident in the business. What is apparent is that the leaders of Southwest thought through the air travel business in a comprehensive way, and avoided falling into traps that have hurt others. The company is not burdened by restrictive labor agreements that now weigh so heavily on its competitors; by design, the company does not operate out of airports that charge high fees; and it does not participate in centralized reservations systems. The company has not attempted to be something that it is not, a mighty global airline, but has instead focused on understanding its niche and serving it profitably. Source: http://www.innovationlabs.com/BusModelWarfare.pdfSouthwest only flies one model of plane. As a result, everyone (mechanics, flight attendants, pilots) at the companyknows the same platform.------------------------------------------------------------At its simplest, a business model simply describes how a company makes money. It’s the products and services it offers, the way it delivers them, and through these elements it is the experiences that it creates for customers.Business model innovators just find ways to create better experiences for their customers, and as a result of doing so the most successful among them earn profits that others did not recognize as even possible.For example:- Google (free services, alternative revenue streams) discovered how to sell words at auction, a new business model that transformed the company into the world’s number one advertising agency, and soon thereafter into one of its most admired companies. - Amazon.com developed a new business model for selling products online, has radically reshaped the book business, and is now working to extend its model into every market. - Apple found a tremendously successful way to sell songs through iTunes, permanently reshaping the music industry. - Fedex set up a system that delivers packages for ten to fifty times more than the Postal Service charges. - Southwest Airlines sells airplane tickets for less than its competitors, but it has nevertheless been the most consistently profitable US airline for two decades. - Wal-Mart, Costco, and Ikea, meanwhile, developed global manufacturing and supply chains that enable them to sell enormous quantities of products at prices once thought unattainably low, undercutting their competitors and redefining the very nature of retail. To reiterate the point made above, the core of each success is that these companies found new ways to earn profits by providing their customers with new and better experiences.Further, the experiences provided by their innovative business models have resulted in enduring relationships that transcended traditional boundaries between customers and companies, and as a result each transformed the industry in which it competes, permanently altering the competitive landscape while becoming a renowned leader.Sourcw: http://www.innovationlabs.com/2010/02/how-to-create-a-winning-business-model/------------------------------------------------------------Innovation in ProcessesOne of the most significant, yet least noticed, economic developments of the last few decades [was] the transformation of international shipping. . . . The idea of containerization was simple: to move trailer-size loads of goods seamlessly among trucks, trains and ships, without breaking bulk. . . . -- Virginia Postrel, The New York TimesSometimes global revolutionary change is not sexy. It's not even computer-driven. Maybe the computer chip spurred globalization, but it was the container ship that made it possible. The idea is to make trade fast, reliable and inexpensive, not just to make the world flat. Containers are like computer chips; they hold lots of stuff in a well-organized fashion. Without the containers, the global transportation network would be running much slower and more costly than it does today. - Peter LorenziSource: http://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Economy/dp/0691136408------------------------------------------------------------
- Right brain / left brain elements
- While culture is a complicated cocktail, four ingredients propel an organization forward: the right people, appropriate rewards and incentives, a common language, and leadership role-modeling.In order to execute on this culture of innovation, firms must have six keys in place.1. Innovation assessmentContrary to popular belief, organizations can evaluate and select for innovation talent. By studying your best people, you can hire others like them and identify within your current population the role that individuals play in the innovation process. These roles include Innovators (those who generate ideas), Drivers of Innovation (those who align ideas with strategies, allocate resources, and build supportive constituencies), and Drivers to Market (those who commercialize and execute market-facing activities).Beyond identifying talent, a selection tool allows managers to focus on the particular needs of these different individuals and understand the specific behaviors that each will demonstrate in the workforce and how to help them make these behaviors as productive as possible.2. Onboarding and trainingWhen employees join your organization, are you able to provide a scorecard of how they measure up relative to others with regard to the three types of roles in the innovation process? If you are, then when employees enter the business, they should quickly know what innovation role they should play on the different teams they work with. On one team, they may have the highest level of innovative talent; on another, they may be best suited to drive innovation. But without this knowledge, you risk slowing the speed of the commercialization process.And are you teaching managers how to use the innovation scorecards of their team members and providing them with innovation training? For supervisors to be successful at any level of the organization, they must be able to conduct structured brainstorming sessions, use their team members most effectively, and direct project and portfolio management processes.3. Innovation indexWhen you compare your organization to others, how do you know how it's performing relative to innovation? Do you have an index that is broad in scope (companies, industries, and countries) that allows you to compare your progress?Engaged employees share their ideas more often, generate more ideas, and generate better ideas.4. Customer metricsCustomer feedback is critical to the innovation pipeline. Are you able to identify your best and worst customers and gather feedback from both? Are you able to take this feedback and constructively use it in the beginning stages of idea generation?5. Employee metricsEmployee engagement has been linked to increasing levels of innovation. Engaged employees share their ideas more often, generate more ideas, and generate better ideas. In one example, the ideas an energy company was able to generate from engaged teams produced on average three times the amount of cost savings compared with ideas from teams that were not engaged.Employee metrics, if done right, allow senior leaders to look across their organization and quickly spot managers who may be blocking the innovation process. Teams that have low levels of engagement are likely to be less innovative, so an engagement program can be an early identifier of poor innovation management pockets within an organization.6. An innovation scorecardIt has been said that "What gets measured gets done." All organizations should build an innovation scorecard if they are to track and measure progress.At this point, you may be wondering "What would this look like at my organization?" Think about how your organization currently structures the teams that are working on new products or processes. If your organization is like most, it pulls in individuals from marketing, R&D, sales, finance, packaging, etc. By doing so, you probably feel like you have created a diverse team that can now drive a project to commercialization.You would be right in this thinking if you not only had team members with diversity of function but also diversity of innovation talent. Without identifying the innovation talents of each individual on the team, for example, you risk putting together a team of all Innovators. You might get a lot of ideas from this group about how to drive this product or process to market, but there will be lack of resource allocation and execution to commercialize.Now imagine that you chose the same functional group of individuals for this project, but you have a group that is diverse in innovation talent. You will have provided for the entire innovation continuum, including idea generation, concept testing, strategy alignment, resource allocation, and commercialization. Giving each member of the team development tailored to his or her unique skills will help you drive the output more efficiently than your competitors can, thus supplying you with a competitive advantage using your people as the weapon.Innovation in the "new normal" will be the driver of organic growth. For companies to maximize these efforts, they must shift their focus from R&D to one that embeds innovation throughout the organization, whether the innovation they seek is a new product, process, or business model.
- During various discussions related to the launch of his 2008 book The Game-Changer (with consultant Ram Charan) Lafley alternatively described his role within P&G as P&G’s co-chief innovation officer (with his chief technology officer), P&G’s chief “external” officer (“selling” the importance of innovation externally), Dr. No (helping to make prudent decisions to shut projects down), and an innovation cheerleader.Meet People's Needs. Recognize that questioning orthodoxy and convention — the key to creativity — begins with questioning the way people are expected to work. How well are their core needs — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — being met in the workplace? The more people are preoccupied by unmet needs, the less energy and engagement they bring to their work. Begin by asking employees, one at a time, what they need to perform at their best. Next, define what success looks like and hold people accountable to specific metrics, but as much as possible, let them design their days as they see fit to achieve those outcomes.Teach Creativity Systematically. It isn't magical and it can be developed. There are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification. They don't always unfold predictably, but they do provide a roadmap for enlisting the whole brain, moving back and forth between analytic, deductive left hemisphere thinking, and more pattern-seeking, big-picture, right hemisphere thinking. The best description of the stages I've come across is in Betty Edward's book Drawing on the Artist Within. The best understanding of the role of the right hemisphere, and how to cultivate it, is in Edwards' first book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.Nurture Passion. The quickest way to kill creativity is to put people in roles that don't excite their imagination. This begins at an early age. Kids who are encouraged to follow their passion develop better discipline, deeper knowledge, and are more persevering and more resilient in the face of setbacks. Look for small ways to give employees, at every level, the opportunity and encouragement to follow their interests and express their unique talents.Make the Work Matter. Human beings are meaning-making animals. Money pays the bills but it's a thin source of meaning. We feel better about ourselves when we we're making a positive contribution to something beyond ourselves. To feel truly motivated, we have to believe what we're doing really matters. When leaders can define a compelling mission that transcends each individual's self-interest, it's a source of fuel not just for higher performance, but also for thinking more creatively about how to overcome obstacles and generate new solutions.Provide the Time. Creative thinking requires relatively open-ended, uninterrupted time, free of pressure for immediate answers and instant solutions. Time is a scarce, overburdened commodity in organizations that live by the ethic of "more, bigger, faster." Ironically, the best way to insure that innovation gets attention is to schedule sacrosanct time for it, on a regular basis.Value Renewal. Human beings are not meant to operate continuously the way computers do. We're designed to expend energy for relatively short periods of time — no more than 90 minutes — and then recover. The third stage of the creative process, incubation, occurs when we step away from a problem we're trying to solve and let our unconscious work on it. It's effective to go on a walk, or listen to music, or quiet the mind by meditating, or even take a drive. Movement — especially exercise that raises the heart rate — is another powerful way to induce the sort of shift in consciousness in which creative breakthroughs spontaneously arise.
- In the coming economic, business environment – the process is how do we assemble the right people at the right time with the right information with regularity and systemic reliability. The key will be not having a business process but having a business process for assembling business processes (yours, customers, suppliers, even competitors) on demand, in real time , seemlessly.The focus is to understand the three models of Knowledge Management developed from three different sectors of society at different time. The OODA Loop (for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) a concept applied to the combat operations process, often at tactical, operational tactical and grand strategic level in the military that is also adopted today by commercial operations. It was created by military strategist and US AirForce Colonel John Boyd in the 60’s. The SECI Model (Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization) model developed in 1991 by Professor IkujiroNonaka of Japan Institute of Science and Technology and the Organizational Knowledge Creation and Management Framework proposed in 2004 by HarriOinas-Kukkonen of the University of Oulu, Finland and Stanford University, USA.
- Enterprise 2.0 centers on the way we organize work. New work structures can enable contextual,agile, integrated, and simplified collaboration among distributed workforces and networks ofpartners and customers. In effect the extended enterprise replaces the monolithic enterprise resultingin more, yet smaller, flatter, distributed and focused organizations. This totally disruptstraditional culture, strategy and infrastructure. We are moving from Enterprise Systems Architectureto Social Systems Architecture and “Bossless Organizations.”1 As this happens, what arethe roles for traditional managers and executives? Management 2.0 is being described and developed by professor Gary Hamel and others that canbe seen in the work, references and activities at the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange)2as management tries to adapt to new models, new realities and a new workforce. Better science(e.g., behavioral, cognitive) is showing that many of our assumptions about what motivates anddissuades people are often wrong—especially when knowledge, creativity and innovation are desired.A short video by Dan Pink sums this problem up nicely, all of which suggests our currentassumptions about managing are inconsistent with our current times.Capitalism 2.0 is discussed and debated around the globe. Do corporations exist solely to maximizetheir bottom lines? Is value creation very different from profitability as we measure it today?Almost simultaneous deterioration of major sectors of the economy suggests that something isamiss. Bailed-out auto makers lost their ability to listen to markets and make things peoplewanted; print media has lost its relevancy as a market maker for advertising; financial institutionscreated opaque, incomprehensible and unsustainable markets; and sanctioned monopolies (tele23com, electric, water) have fought any attempt to open their markets, even though opening theirmarkets and becoming better middlemen is their opportunity. Do speculators make too muchand creators not enough? Is all this because Capitalism 1.0 is built on an obsolete set of idealsthat will be superseded by Capitalism 2.0? Economics 2.0 embodies an assertion that traditional economic behavior isn’t behaving anymore,and no one is really sure why. Traditional government stimuli do not seem to be having theirhistorical effects. Modern economists are starting to think about growth in both developed andemerging economies and contrast those ideas with earlier views in economics. The focus of themodern understanding is on ideas and the ability of ideas to improve technology, leading toprosperity rather than capital and capital assets. Unlike physical capital, ideas can be enjoyed bymany people at once, explaining why past models that ignored ideas and focused on physicalcapital failed to account for the magnitude of economic development in places like Silicon Valley.Behavioral economists have attacked many of the assumptions of Economics 1.0, includingefficient financial markets and rational expectations. Mathematicians are starting to engage usingthe principles and math of complex adaptive systems theory to better describe what goes on ineconomies.3 Does this suggest we don’t fully understand what creates value? Information Technology 2.0 represents a new paradigm for delivering information, coordinatingwork, collaborating on ideas, and reaching customers. IT 2.0 enables all the other “2.0s.” InformationTechnology is effectively becoming the air and water of economic activities—it’s essential,pervasive and basically free. Things we managed so diligently in the past—hardware, software,data centers, even to a degree the people who create them (think open source)—are disappearingas first order considerations in business, hidden behind ideas like “the Cloud,” “fabric,”and any number of “as a Service” offerings. Even leading-edge technology developmentsdivorce themselves from the physical capital aspects of IT and focuson the conceptual andidea-driven elements such as Content-Centric Networking ...
- KU NEV IN = Cynefin ( welsh) (place of multiple belongings) - sense making model (data proceeds framework) versus categorization model (framework proceeds data)Safe fail experiments not fail safe design => complexThink differently in different environmentsConsilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), is the principle that calculating a result by two different methods should lead to the same answer. The word consilience was coined by William Whewell in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840. Although the concept of consilience in Whewell's sense was widely discussed by philosophers of science, the term was unfamiliar to the broader public until the end of the 20th century, when it was vividly revived in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book by the humanist biologist Edward Osborne Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the culture gap between the sciences and the humanities that was the subject of C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).Wilson held that with the rise of the modern sciences, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. He asserted that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understanding the details, to lend to all inquirers "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." Wilson's concept is a much broader notion of consilience than that of Whewell, who was merely pointing out that generalizations invented to account for one set of phenomena often account for others as well.
- Gause's law – In ecology, the competitive exclusion principle: "complete competitors cannot coexist.“GeorgiiFrantsevichGause(Russian: Гео́ргийФра́нцевичГа́узе; December 27, 1910–May 4, 1986), was a Russian biologist who proposed the competitive exclusion principle, fundamental to the science of ecology.The European Commission have recognized the massive strategic economic importance of Digital Business Ecosystems by publishing a hugely impressive multi-disciplinary book (240 pages)The DBE website defines a DBE as the enabling technologies and the paradigms supporting Regional Growth and Innovation in Business Ecosystems mainly composed by SMEs.It goes on to elaborate that….A natural life ecosystem is defined as a biological community of interacting organisms plus their physical environment. In the same way, a business ecosystem is "the network of buyers, suppliers and makers of related products or services” plus the socio-economic environment, including the institutional and regulatory framework. It also means competitors work together (as the do via emergence in a biological ecosystem).A digital ecosystem is a self-organizing digital infrastructure aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organizations that supports the cooperation, the knowledge sharing, the development of open and adaptive technologies and evolutionary business models.The digital ecosystem approach transposes the concepts to the digital world, reproducing the desirable mechanisms of natural ecosystems. As several interacting natural ecosystems exist, several digital ecosystems exists due to differentiation and the development of endemic product and services tailored to specific local needs.A digital ecosystem results from the combination of :1) the free digital ecosystem knowledge- and service-oriented infrastructure, as a public common resource ; 2) the digital components, services and the formalized knowledge which "populate" such infrastructure .A digital ecosystem means to be the IT-enabling technology for business ecosystems based on the dynamic and amorphous interaction among a multiplicity of small organizations.Business Ecosystem + Digital Ecosystem = ( Innovation Ecosystems or Digital Business Ecosystem )A Digital Business Ecosystem or Innovation Ecosystem results from the structurally coupled and co-evolving digital ecosystem and business ecosystem. A network of digital ecosystems, will offer opportunities of participation in the global economy to SMEs and to less developed or remote areas. These new forms of dynamic business interactions and global co-operation among organizations and business communities, enabled by digital ecosystem technologies, are deemed to foster local economic growth. This will preserve local knowledge, culture and identity and contribute to overcome the digital divide.
- Management 2.0 COMMAND & CONTROL +=> enable, facilitate, accelerate; planning => preparation; directing => mentoring; staffing => engagement; controlling => framing
- Old – retiring, forgetting, dying – where are the KM systems?New – work differently – 7/24, own infrastructure – technology and “social”Old – contemplative, deep relationshipNew – google, broad relationship
- Discuss in terms of Tom Peter’s Hollywood model and its evolution.Problem solving interaction map from NodeXLour organizations were never built to be adaptable. Those early management pioneers, a hundred years ago, set out to build companies that were disciplined, not resilient. They understood that efficiency comes from routinizing the nonroutine. Adaptability, on the other hand, requires a willingness to occasionally abandon those routines—and in most organizations there are precious few incentives to do so. That's why change tends to come in only two varieties: the trivial and the traumaticA turnaround is a poor substitute for timely transformation. That's why we need to change the way we change. The body's autonomic systems give us some useful metaphors. When you jump on a treadmill or pick up some weights, your heart starts to pump more blood, automatically. When you stand in front of a large audience to speak, your adrenal glands ramp up the production of adrenaline, spontaneously. When you catch a glimpse of someone who's physically attractive, your pupils dilate reflexively. (Truly, dear, it can't be helped.) Automatically, spontaneously, reflexively—these aren't the words we use to describe how our organizations change, but they should be. That's the holy grail—change without trauma. In a world of mind-flipping change, what matters is not merely a company's competitive advantage at a point in time, but its evolutionary advantage over time.The payoffs to investing in adaptability are many. First, a resilient organization should be able to avoid the sort of big earnings shocks that can slice a company's market value in half. Executives often complain that investors overreact to small earnings misses, but I'm not so sure. In recent years, investors have seen a lot of companies self-destruct when they missed a paradigm shift, underestimated a new competitor, or simply stopped innovating. When a company's earnings disappoint, investors have to ask themselves: was this a blip, the result of an easily corrected operating glitch, or is this an early warning sign of a structural decline in the long-term profitability of this company's business model? Executives will always claim it's a blip, but investors have learned to be wary of glib assurances. The safest thing to do is dump the shares, and then buy them back later once the problems have been remedied. Investors like predictability and will pay more for a less volatile earnings stream. Though short-term earnings can be manipulated with accounting tricks, adaptability is the only thing that can deliver a smooth, upward slope over the long run. An adaptable company rethinks its strategy without having to walk through the valley of the shadow of death; it reinvents itself before getting mugged by the future. As a result, it experiences fewer financial reversals and its share price commands a premium. This is reason enough to care about adaptability, but there's more. An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its core business in ways that open up new avenues for growth. If it had been more adaptable, Best Buy might have seen the opportunity for delivering movies online and beat Netflix to the punch; Coca-Cola might have preempted Gatorade in the sports drinks business; and General Motors, rather than Toyota, might have developed the world's best-selling hybrid. An adaptable company is always reinventing itself, always pioneering new markets. An enterprise that is constantly exploring new horizons is likely to have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent. When a once-successful company runs aground and starts to list, its most talented employees usually don't stick around to bail water, they jump ship. A dynamic company will have employees who are more engaged, more excited to show up to work every day, and thus more productive. And finally, an adaptable company will be more proactive in responding to emerging customer needs. It will take the lead in redefining customer expectations in positive ways. The result: higher levels of customer loyalty and better margins. Building organizations that are as resilient as they are efficient may be the most fundamental business challenge of our time. Adaptability really matters now.
- An effective social enterprise benefits the enterprise by evolving itself organically to become a relevant, connected and involved 2-way interaction between publishers and consumers of information, content and knowledge. In a social enterprise, people are at the center of sharing and collaborating with knowledge.The social enterprise must include several capabilities:Generating content: Employees with subject expertise publish content using a process and technologies to collaborate; discuss and network with each other.Organizing content: Employees need a robust enterprise content management system with right surfacing experience such as search, navigation to increase discoverability.Contributing content: Employees need to see a priority in stories to acquire and understand knowledge easily.Sharing Content: Employees need social capabilities such as Like, Comment with each other.Measuring impact: Quantifying elements of the business receive the most positive results.The key to make it happen are:Empowering people: Skilling leaders & empowering individuals to enable the change and generate support for their organization (formal and emergent) to mobilize around their new experience.Simple Processes: Inventory analysis; cleansing content; developing topic ownerships, on boarding a organization or individuals and communicating effectivelyCulture of Sharing & Simplification: Developing a mindset for sharing and consolidating the enterprise digital experience.Effective Technology: Enabling technologies & processes to maintain content and deal with the signal to noise ration (see MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence Deliberatorium - http://cci.mit.edu/research/deliberatorium.html ) .Impact & Measurement: Is the social working?