Earlier this year I gave the opening keynote at the Google Atmosphere on Tour events in Sydney and Melbourne.
Below is the 2 minute summary video of the event, giving a flavor for the rich ideas shared on the future of the enterprise.
I have just completed the day two opening keynote at Connected Enterprise 2012, following Brian Solis‘s day one keynote.
Here are my slides for the keynote. As always, the slides are designed to accompany my presentation, not to stand alone, so are provided for the audience at the event and any others who may find them useful nonetheless.
In my book Living Networks I wrote about how the networks in which we live are coming to life, making us all part of what we can quite accurately think of as a global brain.
I wrote an extended introduction to the book that went into this concept in depth. However this was not included in the final published book, so I later shared it as an article, Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.
One of the wonderful outcomes of that was that the film-maker Tiffany Shlain, who has long thought on very similar lines, reached out to connect.
Tiffany has just released a marvellous 10 minute movie, Brain Power: From Neurons To Networks, that reflects these ideas. Watch it below, preferably on full screen.
I have been frustrated recently in having been too busy to blog about all but a handful of the insights generated in my many client engagements over the last months. Fortunately things are close to easing up into the end of the year so I’ll try to cover a bit of the backlog.
This afternoon was the last of 3 Round Table discussions I moderated as part of the 21st anniversary celebrations of the Graduate School of Business of the University of New England. This session’s topic was the art of conversation.
It was a rich discussion, and there was much to take from it. I was interested in the skills we identified that are clearly vitally important to successful organizations, yet often significantly underdeveloped.
Conversation is vital for today’s organizations for many reasons, including:
– Customer engagement. We now all understand that markets are conversations, and organizations must have great ability to build real conversations with their customers in a world of social media.
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Last Friday in New York, shortly before Sandy shook things up, I ran a Crowdsourcing for Media and Content workshop as part of the Crowdsourcing Week global series of events.
Media is one of the domains which has been the most impacted by crowdsourcing over the last decade, in a wide variety of guises. The intent of the workshop was to dig into the many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied in creating media and content, and how to do so most effectively.
Below I have shared the slides used in the workshop. They were designed simply to provide some context to the flow of the workshop, and certainly not to stand alone as content, but they may be of some interest even if you did not attend.
My book Getting Results From Crowds was designed as a highly practical overview of how to create value using crowdsourcing. However the last section on Crowd Business Models is perhaps where my deepest interests lie, and is one of the most important issues in the crowd space. Business models are increasingly based on crowds, so we need to understand how to make them work.
As such I wanted to bring together an event to focus attention on crowd business models. I am delighted to be partnering with CrowdConf, the premier crowdsourcing conference in the world, to run a half-day Crowd Business Models Summit immediately preceding CrowdConf at the same venue, UCSF at Mission Bay (where incidentally we also held our Future of Media Summit 2007).
For full event details see the Crowd Business Models Summit website on the CrowdConf site.
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Last week I gave a keynote at an internal conference of a large technology services firm that has recently acquired another firm. The conference brought together senior executives and managers from the two organizations so they could get to know each other and plan how they would work together with existing and new clients.
A significant part of my role was to provide a highly upbeat, optimistic, engaging perspective on the future of business. However I also wanted to address the specific issues they would be encountering in combining their capabilities.
Many years ago when I was working with a large law firm to help them develop their client relationship and cross-selling capabilities, I created a simple framework, shown below.
The fundamental issue for any significant professional firm is to match the best possible capabilities in the organization with the relevant opportunities for value creation at their clients.
This begins at the interface with the client. Whoever has any interaction with the client, including the relationship leader and relationship team, has responsibility to identify and bring to the client the most relevant capabilities of the firm. However there are 5 key steps that are required for that to happen.
Forbes has a nice story about the history of WordPress and the role the open-source software plays in the for-profit business Automattic. The article at one point says:
Automattic has an idiosyncratic workplace. As a legacy of its open-source roots its 120 employees are spread across 26 countries and six continents. Although most work alone at home, each team–usually made up of five or six people–has a generous budget to travel. “All of the money we save on office space, we blow on travel costs,” Mullenweg laughs. Groups have gathered in Hawaii, Mexico and New Zealand. Once a year everyone meets for a week at an accessible destination with a solid Internet connection. A distributed workforce means Automattic can hire talent from around the world–without having to offer the perks and pay of Google, Facebook and Apple.
This brought a response from Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg:
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A major challenge for organizations that are considering internal social media initiatives is that a business case including a financial justification is frequently required.
To be frank, I think ROI calculations for social initiatives are in most cases a waste of time, because so many of the benefits and costs are unknowable before the initiative. A leap of faith is required, after which calculations using real data can be done to help refine strategies.
However if the organization requires a financial case, then those seeing the opportunity need to do what they can to create the case.
Chapter 16 of my report Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is on Building a Business Case. One of the resources I provide in the chapter is a table to help make ROI calculations. All that is required is to put numbers against each of the value and cost items in the table below, where appropriate using a back-of-the-envelope calculation to support them. Not all of the items will be relevant, and you may find other items that are applicable, but it provides a good starting point to generating numbers that can be used in an ROI.
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A recent study from Burson-Marsteller looks in depth at what the Fortune Global 100 are currently doing on social media.
Some of the interesting insights from the study include:
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