The future of high-value relationships

By

Last week I spoke at the annual meeting of a division of a major bank. It was a one-hour event, with a live audience of several hundred, and a few thousand who worked in other locations watching via a live webcast. Given the pace of change in their business and their overt focus on innovation, they had me speak for 20 minutes on the future, followed by the top two divisional executives for 10 minutes each on what they expect in the business moving forward, then the entire leadership team plus myself up for 20 minutes of Q&A. It was a first for them to use an external speaker for the event, though given the success of the format they will undoubtedly do it again. Bringing external perspectives can be invaluable in stimulating new thoughts on the business and where it can go.

My presentation quickly skimmed through the implications of shifting demographics, work dynamics, social expectations, financial and economic structures, and technology, framed in terms of how to think more openly about possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.

However in the final Q&A session I was asked about the future of business relationships. Given commoditization and competitive pressures, what would happen in relationships?
Read more →

KBB: Interview on the essentials of online business

By

Kochie’s Business Builders program on Channel 7, which focuses on helping growing businesses improve their performance, has just started its fifth series. This series they have dedicated a complete program to an “online bootcamp”.

The program starts with an interview with me, after which I go on to interview two of Australia’s top online businesses: Freelancer.com and BigCommerce on their secrets of success.

The program has been excerpted in online videos. The kickoff interview is below. I will post videos from the other interviews shortly.

Here are some snapshots of what I cover in the interview:
Read more →

Workshop slides: Creating the Future of Professional Services

By

I am about to hop on a plane to Hawaii, where I will be running the ‘keynote workshop’ on Creating the Future of Professional Services for global accounting network DFK International’s annual North America conference on Maui. While it’s pretty crazy, I will only be there for as long as I spend travelling to Hawaii and back. I just have too much on now, including a lot of other client work and finishing a book very soon. In any case I intend to enjoy my brief sojourn in the sun :-).

As usual I will share my slides, mainly for workshop participants, since the slides are not intended to be used as a stand-alone, but also for anyone else who happens to find value in them.

The original idea was for me to do a keynote, but we soon developed the idea to be a half-day highly participatory session that will go into detail on pressing practical and strategic issues. There are five sections to the workshop, each with a presentation supported by the slides below, and then activities including discussions, case studies, exercises, strategy frameworks, and action plans, which are described in detailed handouts for all participants. The five sections are:
* Driving Forces
* High-Value Client Relationships
* Power of Networks
* Levers of Success
* Leadership

Here are the slides:

Workshop: Creating the Future of Professional Services

View more presentations from rossdawson

Reconfiguring the world of business around the customer

By

The esteemed JP Rangaswami, who was at the very front of creating Enterprise 2.0 at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and is now at Salesforce.com, has just written a compelling post Thinking about the Social Enterprise, in which he distills the essence of social business.

You really need to read the entire post to get the flow of his argument, however here are a couple of excerpts:
Read more →

Breaking: Google+ will be a reputation engine

By

For years I have been writing about reputation and have often said that this will be the decade of the reputation economy. Yet until recently there has been very little in the space. The social media measurement systems such as Klout and PeerIndex have limited data scope and while they talk the language of reputation actually measure influence. Honestly.com is a more pure play in the individual reputation space, but has got limited traction so far.

In recognition of the massive opportunity in the reputation space we have been building a stealth start-up Repyoot (holding page only for now), which will shortly be launched as a limited scale influence ratings engine, with the intention of morphing into a generalized reputation engine.

In developing the service and discussing it with VCs, we have always seen the most obvious latent competitors in the reputation measurement space as Google and LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s recommendation service is a long way from a true reputation service, but it provides a foundation for building one. Google’s depth of data, positioning, and mentality mean that it is well-positioned to develop an individual reputation service. While it is probably not related, I know that Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, has been very interested in reputation services for some years, as one of the services that would be of most value in helping developing regions.
Read more →

How large professional service firms are shifting to networked services and open innovation

By

I recently ran a workshop on the future of business at the strategy offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firm.

During the evening I had a very interesting conversation with one of the regional directors about how professional service firms are tapping external networks.

For over a decade I have written and spoken about the rise of networked professional services, looking at the trend for independent professionals to collaborate in order to compete with large firms. As I wrote in Chapter 9 of Living Networks:

Professional networks, although hardly a new phenomenon, are rapidly rising in importance. Their evolution is being driven by both the new ways of working enabled by connectivity, and the swift shift to professionals working as free agents. Corporate clients are increasingly happy to consider independent professionals as service providers, and in some cases actually prefer effective professional networks to expensive global firms with cookie-cutter approaches. The bottom-line is that for many types of business, professional networks are increasingly viable competitors to large, established firms. This is already apparent, but will become more obvious in coming years.

Read more →

Integrating social media into cross-channel customer relationships

By

Una giornata di pioggia e di sole
A week ago I was in Sanya, China, where I gave the guest keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference.

NICE Systems’ history is in providing voice recording and analytics to companies with many customer interactions, such as banks and telcos, for customer services and security. From there it has morphed into providing a series of broad-based platforms to improve customer interactions across channels.

In the world of Customer Relationship Management, an increasingly important and now dominant issue is effectively managing relationships across channels. The critical ‘single customer view’ becomes more difficult yet ever more important as new channels such as chat, mobile apps, and a variety of social media are added to existing customer communication channels.
Read more →

3 major shifts in the nature of trust in business relationships

By

While the subtitle of my book Living Networks referred to the ‘hyperconnected’ economy, the reality is that living networks are built primarily on human relationships based on mutual knowledge and trust. Here is a brief excerpt from the book about what is changing in the world of trust.

Trust is a business perennial—from the days when chickens were traded for cowrie shells until we start trading with extraterrestrial races, trust has been and always will be the central factor in business relationships. However in the networked world there are three vital shifts in the nature and role of trust.
Read more →

Keynote: Building Business in a Connected World

By

Tomorrow morning I am giving the keynote at City of Port Phillip’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing session for the year in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the topic of Building Business in a Connected World. Here are event details and registration.

Below are my slides for the presentation, which is almost entirely based on our Success in a Connected World visual framework launched earlier today.

The usual caveats apply – the slides are NOT intended to stand alone but to provide a visual accompaniment to my presentation, so these are shared primarily for those who attended my keynote. However others may still find them useful or interesting.

Note that the presentation is intended primarily for individuals and smaller businesses. It’s a completely different presentation for large enterprise.

Building Business in a Connected World

View more presentations from rossdawson

5 recommendations for successfully implementing distributed innovation and shared value

By

Chapter 5 from Living Networks, on Distributed Innovation – Intellectual Property in a Collaborative World, is still immensely relevant today. We are still relatively early on in working out the implications for innovation of distributed value creation.

Here is a section towards the end of the chapter which provides 5 recommendations on managing innovation in a networked world. While some of the tools have changed since this was written, the principles haven’t.

IMPLEMENTED DISTRIBUTED INNOVATION AND SHARED VALUE

At a scientific convention in Hawaii in 1972, Stanley Cohen from Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of the University of California met for the first time in what proved to be the beginning of a long friendship and collaborative partnership. Their joint work on a process for cloning genes in microorganisms resulted in three patents that formed the foundation of the nascent biotechnology industry. Stanford University ended up as the sole owner of the patents, reaping over $150 million in royalties as a result.
Read more →