Many of my keynote speeches focus on the future of business and where technology is going. One of the most common responses, and one I’ve heard many times after my speeches over the last few weeks, is to be staggered by the implications of where this is all going, followed by the question, “So how do I keep on top of everything that’s happening?” In a world in which the pace of developments and amount of information available in any given domain is soaring out of sight, it’s a very valid question.
I intend to spend more of my time answering this question in a practical fashion, as this has become an absolutely vital issue in a world of information run amok. For now, I thought I’d post an article I originally published 10 years ago in the October 1997 issue of Company Director magazine. Everything I wrote is still completely valid. However now we have access to many technological tools, which if used well, can assist us in coping with information overload. More on that later, along with some of the tools and approaches I find effective. The original article is here:
Information Overload – Problem or Opportunity?
“We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [information] that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.” John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends.
Information overload is a fact of life for company directors, senior managers, and all professionals. Information is coming in from all sides in the form of reports, memos, newspapers, journals, and letters, and now the advent of e-mail and Internet has turned the torrent into a flood.
How can directors cope with the onslaught? Or rather, since we are businesspeople, it seems the question should be how can we turn the reality of the new business environment into an opportunity and a competitive advantage?
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Eight steps to thriving on information overload
By Ross DawsonMany of my keynote speeches focus on the future of business and where technology is going. One of the most common responses, and one I’ve heard many times after my speeches over the last few weeks, is to be staggered by the implications of where this is all going, followed by the question, “So how do I keep on top of everything that’s happening?” In a world in which the pace of developments and amount of information available in any given domain is soaring out of sight, it’s a very valid question.
I intend to spend more of my time answering this question in a practical fashion, as this has become an absolutely vital issue in a world of information run amok. For now, I thought I’d post an article I originally published 10 years ago in the October 1997 issue of Company Director magazine. Everything I wrote is still completely valid. However now we have access to many technological tools, which if used well, can assist us in coping with information overload. More on that later, along with some of the tools and approaches I find effective. The original article is here:
Information Overload – Problem or Opportunity?
“We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [information] that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.” John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends.
Information overload is a fact of life for company directors, senior managers, and all professionals. Information is coming in from all sides in the form of reports, memos, newspapers, journals, and letters, and now the advent of e-mail and Internet has turned the torrent into a flood.
How can directors cope with the onslaught? Or rather, since we are businesspeople, it seems the question should be how can we turn the reality of the new business environment into an opportunity and a competitive advantage?
Read more →
Professional services network offsite: Tapping the Power of Collaboration
By Ross DawsonThis morning I gave an extended keynote session at the annual offsite of a very interesting global professional services network, which brought together the leaders of the member firms. International networks in accounting, law, consulting, and other professional services have flourished over the last years as small to mid-sized firms have sought the benefits of belonging to a network. Brand, access to resources, providing a more comprehensive offering, and being able to offer integrated services to clients that are active overseas all make it an attractive proposition.
Yet the reality is that the degree of collaboration within most of these networks is, to put it kindly, far less than it could be. There is often little awareness of the distinctive capabilities of other firms in the network, let alone the inclination to bring them business or to integrate their services into what they offer their clients.
As such, my keynote address was on the Power of Collaboration, covering among other issues the Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services, knowledge-based relationships, organizational networks, trust-building, and core strategy issues for professional services firms.
I have long said that networks of professional firms have the potential to challenge and rival the major professional firms. We’ve seen many examples emerge, and clients are increasingly happy to deal with networked firms. I’ve experienced this directly with Future Exploration Network, where we’ve run significant consulting projects drawing on a global network of resources, and been chosen in preference to big-name consulting firms. For any professional services network, there is absolutely extraordinary potential in being more collaborative. Yet there is also the reality of significant cultural and behavioral change being required from member firms for this to happen.
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Keynote speech on Creating the Future of Business
By Ross DawsonYesterday I gave a keynote on Creating the Future of Business at the Q400 Business Summit in Brisbane, which was themed Future Shocks. The feedback was fantastic; I’m hoping to be able to post a video of my presentation soon.
One of the key themes of my presentation was the Open Economy, in which everything is laid out open, across business processes, visibility, transparency, borders, industry boundaries and more. One of the stories I used was that of Goldcorp, which I told briefly in my book Living Networks, in the context of business applications of open source models:
Since then, the story has appeared in many different contexts, including being used as the opening example in Don Tapscott’s excellent book Wikinomics, and in Procter & Gamble’s internal communications promoting their open innovation initiatives. It remains a good inspiration for open business initiatives. It is told in more detail by Fast Company magazine.
Some of the other topics I covered in the speech were the acceleration of the global economy, how it is now impossible for businesses to hide, non-zero sum thinking, the role of competent jerks in organizational networks, and the characteristics of high-performers.
Facebook and portals in the workplace
By Ross DawsonFollowing close on the heels of SurfControl’s Facebook-is-costing-the-Australian-economy-$5-billion! story and some of the more balanced media response, Sophos, another internet security company, has released survey results saying that half of all companies restrict access to Facebook. Apparently 43% block Facebook outright, while 7% more give access only when it is deemed relevant. These figures may be correct, but without any methodology being released that I’m aware of, they are certainly suspect given the biased source of the data. I’m presuming that the figures are for the US only, as most non-US organizations are unlikely at this time to have explicitly banned Facebook, though its soaring international usage is putting it clearly on the agenda for corporate filters.
Interestingly, the survey apparently also noted that many of the other 50% of organizations were deliberately allowing Facebook either for the explicit networking value of the tool, or in order not to annoy their staff.
Richard MacManus has provided his usual insightful and considered views on the issue, noting that Facebook is effectively a portal that aggregates many applications, including many that are absolutely work-oriented. He points to an earlier post on Read/Write Web listing 10 work applications on Facebook among the hundreds of applications available, including To Do lists, Email, Calendar, Online Word Processing and Groupware. Of course the reality is that most people are using Facebook primarily as a work and social networking tool, and for many of the fun applications available within the platform, with work applications so far gettting little traction.
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“Facebook ban a little hasty”: counting the benefits of social networks to the enterprise
By Ross DawsonFollowing up on yesterday’s kerfuffle on Facebook in the enterprise, the Australian Financial Review has an article on page 3 titled “Facebook ban a little hasty”. While briefing mentioning the spurious numbers provided by SurfControl, they report that Pacific Publications, a major magazine publisher, has banned employees from accessing Facebook, while law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler blocks Facebook from 8am to 6pm. Apparently in the case of Pacific Magazines, bandwidth and system crashes were mentioned as reasons for the ban. They quote Bruce McCabe of S2 Intelligence describing their approach as “amateurish” and saying “it won’t work and they will eventually get over it.”
The article finishes by quoting me:
All in all, a rather more balanced view than the scare-mongering appearing in most of the media yesterday. From here, the task is to educate the corporate sector more on the benefits of effective social networks inside and outside the organization, and how best to support it.
I also did three radio interviews yesterday, in each case the story being the benefits to organizations of their employees using social networks well.
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Companies that close networking doors jeopardize their future
By Ross DawsonThere has been extensive coverage in the Australian media today about a press release from internet filtering company SurfControl, in which they make up a spurious figure that the use of Facebook on company time is costing business up to A$5 billion a year. This is based on 800,000 employees spending an hour a day on Facebook, numbers which have appear to have no basis other than the imagination of the report’s authors. SurfControl sells software to block employees using sites such as Facebook. Their vested interest has resulted in a highly inaccurate and distorted view of the use of social networks in organizations being presented in the media.
Of course, this is not to say that there aren’t plenty of company employees working on improving their social lives while they draw a salary.
However, the more important side of the story is that in a knowledge-based economy such as Australia, effective networking is absolutely essential to corporate productivity.
As a research leader at the University of Virginia’s Network Roundtable, the world’s premier organization studying organizational networks, I both do extensive research on networks in and across companies, and have access to the best research globally in the field.
Research at institutions such as Harvard and M.I.T. has consistently shown that employees’ personal networks are in many cases the single biggest factor impacting their productivity and ability to contribute to the company.
This is why organizations such as IBM, Procter & Gamble, PricewaterhouseCoopers and most world-class organizations I am aware of are focusing on how they can HELP their employees to network and build connections inside and outside their organizations, not hinder them.
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A rapidly growing advertising segment: compelling content people flock to watch
By Ross DawsonA few months ago I wrote a piece about new business models for content, sparked by a fascinating dream I had. In the post I mused:
Now the model of ads being presented as content is rapidly gaining prominence. People are not quite yet paying to watch the ads, but they’re certainly choosing to watch them. An article in the New York Times titled Now, the Clicking is to Watch the Ads, Not Skip Them and a piece in AdWeek called Ad Portals: Will Viewers Tune In? lay out some of the current and forthcoming offerings:
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Marketers accepting loss of control is on the way to the mainstream
By Ross DawsonA recent article in Smartcompany magazine titled Web 2.0: The risk, the reward, discussed the opportunities and risks of Web 2.0, focusing on the lack of control in marketing in the new online world. It quotes extensively from lawyers on some of the legal realities of dealing with negative commentary online, and then goes on to quote from me:
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The evisceration of traditional media – advertising flows to digital
By Ross DawsonThe naysayers of the dot-com era took particular delight in the demise of Henry Blodget, the Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch (where I used to work in the late 1980s) who was caught out promoting Internet stocks that he apparently privately thought were “a piece of junk” or “a dog”. As part of a subsequent settlement he is now not allowed to work in the securities industry. However Blodget continues to research the Internet industry on his blog Internet Outsider, where he has recently been writing provocatively titled posts such as Dead-tree media deathwatch: RIP Business 2.0, Running the Numbers: Why Newspapers are Screwed, and The Great Advertising Share Shift: Google Sucks Life Out of Old Media.
In this last post, Blodget analyzes the top 19 media companies (with supporting spreadsheets provided), indicating that advertising has shifted to online by 7% over the course of one year. The top-line figures are that US advertising at Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft grew by $1.3 billion in the second quarter of 2007, while advertising at the 15 largest other media organizations fell by $280 million in the same period.
Or from another perspective, total advertising increased by 8% to $13.8 billion over the last year, with online increasing from $3 billion to $4.2 billion (23% to 30%), while offline advertising decreased from $9.9 billion to $9.6 billion (77% to 70%). Blodget comments:
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Media industry network analysis – tools for better strategic decisions
By Ross DawsonAmong the most powerful applications of network analysis is understanding industry structure and the implications for strategy. While this is still a relatively new field, we are beginning to uncover some very specific approaches and applications to industry network analysis. If you go to a large strategy consulting firm to provide strategy recommendations, you will get a thorough analysis of your industry. However this is almost always highly linear, looking at market shares, value chains, and industry trends. This hides the richness of highly interconnected industry structures. The next 5-10 years of strategy analysis will see a far greater use of network analysis to understand leverage points for
In the Future of Media Report 2007, we included some new analysis by Laurie Lock Lee. In the Future of Media Report 2006 we used Laurie’s analysis of shifts in media industry networks from 2001 to 2006, and earlier this year I featured some high-level analysis on the network structure of the Australian media industry. This new network analysis goes considerably deeper, analyzing the change in industry structure before and after a significant acquistion, by Macquarie Media Group of Southern Cross Broadcasting. An overview of the analysis is below. See the Future of Media Report 2007 for the full details.
There are a wide range of highly practical applications of industry network analysis. One, as illustrated in the example below, is analysis of industry structure before and after potential acquisitions or divestments by your company or your competitors. This can show the industry impact of major transactions, and provide further insights into their value. Another example in the media sector which we are currently exploring is examining the rich networks between advertisers, ad agencies, media buyers, and publishers. Viewing this from a network (rather than a simple market share) perspective enables very specific insights into how advertising spending can be shifted from one publisher to another. I’ll continue to post high-level views of some of this work and the kinds of benefits our clients are deriving from this.
MEDIA INDUSTRY NETWORK ANALYSIS: CASE STUDY
Laurie Lock Lee, Optimice
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