Recently I've found myself reading a number of articles and blog posts decrying the untimely demise of the social business movement. So what do you think, has social for business run its course and now we should just move on, because there's "nothing to see here"? Have businesses given it a good go and, finding no value, are they abandoning their efforts? Okay, right up front here, let me say clearly, social for business is not only not dead, it's thriving and delivering lots of value to businesses! In fact, I believe that the changes associated with social business are absolutely critical for businesses in the information age if they want to attract and retain the best employees and partners and if they want to meet the expectations of their customers. In our last social business survey conducted Summer 2012, we found that 67% of North American businesses were already using some social tools for business, up from 42% the prior year. So if that's true, why all the doom and gloom predictions?

I think that there's still a general lack of understanding around what social business is and isn't. If you think it's just about implementing / using new technology your wrong, social business isn't a new marketing campaign on,..  Read the article

This is a sequel of Edgar Schein Organizational Culture and Leadership review, focussing on the sole Chapter 20. In this chapter, the great man discuss Learning Culture and the Learning Leader.

Schein shares Gary Hamel points of view regarding today’s market and economy : we have no idea what tomorrow’s world will be except that “It will be different, more complex more fast paced and more culturally diverse. This means that...  Read the article

I know, we are now in 2013, and announcing anything for a past date falls short from being a prediction. But as we are struggling to help organizations transform to adapt to uncertainty, I often find myself thinking that we already did that and went there before, when considering where social business is heading to. Whether on the technological or on the conceptual side, much buzz is made which takes us back from the future. There are many reasons for that, the simplest one being the necessity to survive in present industrial logic while setting the basis to allow businesses to thrive in a wirearchy. New technologies and emergent behaviors must make their way into our dominant top-down, production-based, model before being able to give birth to a model well-suited to complexity and to a knowledge-based era. Yet, most of the trends which shape the social business landscape seem to pull us back into a “déjà vu” draped in new clothes, like a jay dressed in peacock feather. Predicting sometimes looks like diving deeper into a dull past… This article will deal with the technological aspect of this shilly-shallying, while I will consider the conceptual side in another post.

As I began collecting ideas for this post, Bertrand Duperrin published...

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Social Media, Big Data, Marketing Automation, and Mobile are the only things that matter now, and all the “cool kids” are heavily investing in gamification and customer experience initiatives.

Of course none of the above are true, but if we are to believe the media around us, you’d think that if you’re not doing all or most of the above, you’re going out of business next year.

It brings to mind the ridiculous valuations of the dot com bubble, or the real estate boom, or those that invested millions in CRM or ERP, only to see... Read the article