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:
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This month’s Qantas Business Radio has a technology focus, including interviews with Nick Leeder, Managing Director of Google Australia, Simon Hackett, Managing Director of Internode, Peter Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital, Charis Palmer, Editor of Technology Spectator, Ian Hogg, CEO of FremantleMedia Australia, as well as myself.
There are some great insights in the various interviews, and if you’re not going to be on a Qantas flight you can listen to or download the interviews here, though I believe only until the end of August.
My interview was very broad-ranging: we spent some time discussing implications for organizations of a connected world including the role of crowdsourcing and the idea of the global brain, went on to look at how to use the iPad for work and why it is the first technology that is better than paper for many purposes, and finally when newspapers will become extinct around the world.
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Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context.
Here are a few of the points we make in the video:
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Arthur C. Clarke was certainly one of the most prescient people of the last century, anticipating many developments and in fact inventing the geo-stationary satellite on which much of the early media and communication revolution was based.
In this fantastic segment from a BBC broadcast in 1964 he confidently makes two predictions, one absolutely accurate, one completely wrong.
He says (from 1:45 to 3:13):
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In my recent keynotes I have frequently used variations on my Transformation of Business framework, which looks at how Technology Drivers and Social Drivers lead to a changed Business Landscape, and in turn New Drivers of Success.
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.
My friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard, who runs The Futures Agency (which I am part of), was recently in Sydney for a speaking engagement. We took the opportunity to record a series of conversations on the future. Here is our conversation on the future of money.
The key points we make are:
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Below is an excerpt from my book Living Networks that describes how to develop effective strategies in what I call the “flow economy” of information of ideas, where today almost all value resides. You can also download the complete Chapter 7 on The Flow Economy from the book website.
While the examples I used in the book are now a little dated, the strategic concepts are still absolutely relevant. I find that senior executives and strategists at my corporate clients continue to find the strategic planning process outlined here extremely useful. While the flow economy framework is most obviously relevant in technology, media, telecommunications, and services, it can be usefully applied in almost any industry.
The six elements of the flow economy
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Last night I flew into Sanya, at the southernmost tip of China, to give the keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference tomorrow.
When I walked up to give my passport to the immigration official, on the counter in front of me was a box with 4 large buttons. There were green 2 smiley faces saying you were happy or very happy with your interaction, and two sad faces saying you were unhappy with the service or that it was taking too long.
My passport was quickly processed and passed back to me with a genuine smile, so I pressed the happy button.
While the Chinese visa application process requires significant documentation, both times I have applied for Chinese visas in the last couple of months I was in and out of the visa application center within minutes – it was very efficient.
So, the big question is when US immigration will learn from Chinese lessons in excellence in customer service.
Crowdsourcing is rapidly gaining visibility as a mainstream business topic. The current issue of Outsource magazine has a good article titled The Road of the Crowd. It was written by Steve Bynghall, who produced the recent IBF24 event run by Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and who is collaborating with me on some projects.
It’s a good article providing a nice overview of the field, and well worth reading in full. Here are some of my quotes used in the piece.
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