While I get to see and hear about hundreds of product announcements, this one is particularly interesting. The race to leverage computing power to synthesize incredibly huge amounts of disparate data in real time to meet the needs of customer demands is the next frontier of customer relations. Today at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global [...] Read the article

Location, location, location. The concept immediately brings back to mind college marketing classes and textbooks; clear lessons from industrial age distribution models. The focus has slowly faded away, however, over the past couple of decades with the invention and growth of a digitally connected, flat economy in which we can buy anything… from anyone… from [...] Read the article

Seth Godin does a phenomenal job of providing insights. Below is something he wrote that I wish I did, but I’ll be saving this and committing it to memory. In many ways, it’s marketing 101, but the clarity with which it’s presented is something every marketer can benefit from From Seth’s Blog: The best approach [...] Read the article

I’ll never forget meeting some people in a remote village of Laos (Southeast Asia) a few years ago. The village had no electricity. Not only was it a journey across culture and geography, but a journey back in time. Our translator helped us to ask about how they lived. They told us how they farmed, [...] Read the article

A manager recently voiced his concerns: “Most employees prefer being told what to do. They are willing to accept being treated like children in exchange for reduced stress. They are also willing to obey authority in exchange for job security.” That is the way we have seen it: managers inspire, motivate and control employees who need to be inspired, motivated and controlled. These dynamics create the system of management and justify its continuation.

If we want to meet the challenges of the post-industrial world, this relationship needs to change. The workers changing their role are often seen as a matter of the extent to which the managers are willing to allow it and give up responsibility. In reality it is as much a matter of how much the workers are willing to grow their (management) capacity and take more and wider responsibility.

The dysfunctional relationship between managers and employees creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and a systemic failure in creative, knowledge-based work. What is tragic is that neither side normally understands the predictability of what is going on. The pattern is a mutually reinforcing self-destructive process that manifests itself as a steady decline in the authority of management and productivity of work.

A few researchers have started to dispute ...  Read the article

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Our educational system is broken. This isn’t breaking news, of course, but what strikes me is that, while being more and more aware of the deep changes at work in our life, and of the necessity for the corporate world to adapt to the growing hyper-connected nature of our world, most “social business” discussions circle around ways to enhance operational mechanisms, and tend to ignore the real infrastructure these are built from. Can we really talk about trust, collaboration, or leadership, without considering seriously the social and psychological mold which conditions so many of our behaviors: education?

From Socrates to Black Hussars

Far from all the hype surrounding social and collaborative enterprise technologies, social learning remains contained to a confidential arena. Putting side by side the words “social” and “education” (in the mundane sense of knowledge acquisition) in the context of the workplace means...

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In a post on ReadWriteEnterprise, guest author Vijay Dheap, Mobile Security Strategist at IBM, outlines how organizations can effectively implement a mobile risk management strategy. Below is an excerpt of the post, but for the full version please read: The Mobile Enterprise: 4 Steps To Keeping It Secure [Infographic]

Security is a balancing act, especially when it comes to emerging technologies that promise to unlock massive business potential. Each new wave of change requires an enterprise to adapt its security posture, or risk being left behind – or exposed to unmanaged risk.

Mobile is no different.

Given the dynamic nature of the mobile market (see mobile stats in the infographic below), it can be difficult for an enterprise to define a mobile risk management strategy. Organizational inertia alone can lead to...  Read the article

As I’m sure you’ve already read somewhere else today, Yahoo is banning working from home. This move has been met with derision as such a backwards step, but also with agreement from some former Yahoo employees. The quote that stood out most to me was this:

 A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo.

What struck me was how difficult it would be for an employee of a company with an established enterprise social network to hide in this way. Their absence would be noted both anecdotally (“Richard doesn’t seem to be in my activity stream much this week”) and statistically in usage reports.

I work from home all the time, but remain one of the most active contributors to BroadVision’s own internal Clearvaleenterprise social network. I’m not the most active any more, but almost everyone who has overtaken me also works from home all the time. Indeed, we consistently see much higher activity from home-workers than office-workers. On an enterprise social network you can...  Read the article

If we truly believe in customer “relationships”, then the concept that the customer is always right is unfortunately flawed, because very few people are ALWAYS right. Customers can be irrational, selfish, irresponsible, and even unprofitable.

As in any relationship, sometimes there is mis-alignment of expectations and lack of a compelling value proposition for both sides. The opportunity for value exchange changes and evolves over time. The duty of an organization is to continually listen, show empathy, gain a deeper understanding of needs and jobs, and provide a product or service offering that provides significant value for their customers, or better yet, provide a platform for customers to co-create their own products and services, and support each other in their mutual journeys and jobs to be done.

To fail to recognize that some customers are...  Read the article