Some of my most interesting work in in helping clients create effective processes for participative strategy. The traditional approach to strategy is that it is generated in the executive suite or by highly-paid consultants, then it is communicated to staff, usually rather ineffectively.
There is an increasing recognition that many people across the organization have invaluable insights into industry change, competition, client requirements, innovation and other issues that will help shape strategy. The challenge is in establishing processes that enable broad-based participation in a useful way, tapping ideas and generating positive energy for change.
In some cases, for example as I helped a global real-estate development company to implement, this can be framed in a fun competition format, assisting teams to generate visions of where the company can go. In other cases, a formal process can be created to expose staff across the company to strategic issues, then generating, capturing, filtering, and applying their insights to corporate strategy, as I did for a large financial services company.
Here is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my book Living Networks providing some of the broader issues to address in implementing participative strategy.
CREATING PARTICIPATIVE STRATEGY
The Work-Out process is one of General Electric’s standard practices. This brings together 40 to 100 people in a “town meeting” to discuss specific issues, and make firm recommendations. Once the issues that need to be addressed have been identified, these are clearly defined by a team, and attendees for the meeting are selected from a range of functions and managerial levels. The team meet in an offsite location for usually three days, commencing with a briefing by the relevant executive, who then leaves. The participants break into a number of teams, and in a structured process come up with clear recommendations. At the end these are presented to the senior manager, who must make a decision on the spot whether to proceed. Work-Out sessions are routinely run across General Electric’s divisions, and often include customers and suppliers.
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Will our reputation systems be distributed? Probably not for a long time
By Ross DawsonThe development of reputation systems will be a central aspect of the economy and society this decade. While we are still early in the overall process of building robust systems that are themselves trustworthy, the pace of development is accelerating.
Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) is putting a lot of thought into the issue. His recent post Trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence, begins:
The ultimate issue for Craig is how these systems are developed:
Craig expanded on these ideas in an interview for GigaOm, below.
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Creating competitive differentiation with Enterprise 2.0
By Ross DawsonImplementing Enterprise 2.0 effectively is extremely challenging, as many organizations have discovered. However that is precisely why succeeding can create real and lasting competitive differentiation. In fact I believe that the ability to use collaborative technologies to enhance organizational performance will be one of the most critical competences for companies in years to come. This is not least because this ability reflects on the culture and implicit organizational structure far more than it does on technology.
Here is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0, providing some of the basic arguments as to why Enterprise 2.0 is a key management issue.
CREATING DIFFERENTIATION
Nicholas Carr’s 2003 Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter created massive controversy and debate by affirming that information technology was now a commodity and no longer provided competitive advantage to companies.
Since then, numerous articles and research studies have shown that the degree and effectiveness of investment in information technology does drive competitive differentiation within industries.
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The power of Juicystar07 demonstrates two key trends in influence
By Ross DawsonWhile we were working on the Future of Influence Summit last year I encapsulated the essence of what I was seeing in the space in Five key trends in how influence is transforming society, complementing our Influence Landscape.
If you’ve managed to avoid Juicystar07 and Allthatglitters21 so far, your time is up. They provide a fantastic example of two of the key trends in influence. Blair Fowler (Juicystar07) and Elle Fowler (Allthatglitters21) are sisters who review beauty and fashion products on their YouTube channels, with a total of 50 million and 31 million video views respectively. The video below is a “haul” review of a sponsor’s products which was also being filmed by Good Morning America.
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Yes, internet bandwidth IS a key driver of economic growth
By Ross DawsonA commenter on my last blog post The latest country comparisons in that key economic driver: broadband speed questioned whether bandwidth does drive economic growth.
While it is easy to take that for granted, there are in fact many studies that have demonstrated this fact. One of the more interesting is a Booz & Co study that compared labor productivity growth over 5 years with bandwidth, titled Digital Highways: The Role of Government in 21st-Century Infrastructure.
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The latest country comparisons in that key economic driver: broadband speed
By Ross DawsonSpeedtest.net is my go-to resource for Internet speed testing, whether it’s checking whether there are service problems, or making sure that event venues where we have video over IP links to speakers around the world have sufficient bandwidth.
One of the great additions to the service is a compilation of all their data to show bandwidth speeds around the world. While it is not necessarily fully accurate data, it is definitely current. The most thoroughly researched source for broadband comparisons is the OECD, but unfortunately the latest data from them is a couple of years old now, during which there have been significant changes in the landscape.
South Korea is the winner, with an average speed of 22.47Mbps, but it is closely followed by Japan, and countries in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia (including the #2 on the list, Aland Islands, part of Finland).
USA is #30 and Australia #43, well down in the rankings, though both are very large and economically distributed. Countries like China and Malaysia do respectably, in the 2-3Mbps range, though the problem is China in particularly still has substantial dial-up access.
As pretty much all governments have recognized, there is no question that broadband access will be a key economic driver. It will be interesting to map quite how much.
Full list of broadband speeds in 181 countries below the fold.
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Ad networks increase their domination of the online ad market
By Ross DawsonI’m in the process of preparing for an internal webinar to a global network of media specialists of a leading agency. I looked back at and updated one of the charts from my Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media framework, illustrating the shift in revenue and advertising models.
Source: comScore media metrix
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More on personal reputation systems – video interview of Travis Kalanick
By Ross DawsonFollowing up on my post Personal reputation systems are about to take off… but the next start-up won’t last, taking off on Techcrunch’s pre-announcement of a new personal reputation start-up, Brad King pointed me to this very interesting video he took of investor Travis Kalanick, who is almost certainly talking about the same start-up. He makes some very interesting comments, not least about how pissed off everyone is going to be about this.
Personal reputation systems are about to take off… but the next start-up won’t last
By Ross DawsonMichael Arrington of Techcrunch writes that this week a start-up will launch that is “effectively Yelp for people,” and promises detailed coverage in the next few days.
This is of great interest, not least because our own start-up Repyoot will be launching in public beta in the next couple of weeks, starting as an influence ratings engine within a limited domain, and intending to evolve into a broad-based reputation engine for people.
The thrust of Arrington’s article is that if we are all open to anonymous feedback…
…we will have to change how we judge reputation.
In 2007 I expressed similar sentiments in Watch out! The intimate details of your life will be visible forever more…, saying
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New ventures in political crowdsourcing
By Ross DawsonUser-contributed content is often far more up-to-date than other sources. I just stumbled across some interesting current news while browsing through Wikipedia’s List of crowdsourcing projects.
The UK Conservative Party has launched Your Budget Response 2010, a website that is intended to allow anyone to identify problems, oversights and issues in the government’s budget, to fuel the Conservative Party’s response to the budget.
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3 steps to creating participative strategy processes in organizations
By Ross DawsonSome of my most interesting work in in helping clients create effective processes for participative strategy. The traditional approach to strategy is that it is generated in the executive suite or by highly-paid consultants, then it is communicated to staff, usually rather ineffectively.
There is an increasing recognition that many people across the organization have invaluable insights into industry change, competition, client requirements, innovation and other issues that will help shape strategy. The challenge is in establishing processes that enable broad-based participation in a useful way, tapping ideas and generating positive energy for change.
In some cases, for example as I helped a global real-estate development company to implement, this can be framed in a fun competition format, assisting teams to generate visions of where the company can go. In other cases, a formal process can be created to expose staff across the company to strategic issues, then generating, capturing, filtering, and applying their insights to corporate strategy, as I did for a large financial services company.
Here is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of my book Living Networks providing some of the broader issues to address in implementing participative strategy.
CREATING PARTICIPATIVE STRATEGY
The Work-Out process is one of General Electric’s standard practices. This brings together 40 to 100 people in a “town meeting” to discuss specific issues, and make firm recommendations. Once the issues that need to be addressed have been identified, these are clearly defined by a team, and attendees for the meeting are selected from a range of functions and managerial levels. The team meet in an offsite location for usually three days, commencing with a briefing by the relevant executive, who then leaves. The participants break into a number of teams, and in a structured process come up with clear recommendations. At the end these are presented to the senior manager, who must make a decision on the spot whether to proceed. Work-Out sessions are routinely run across General Electric’s divisions, and often include customers and suppliers.
Read more →