In an article I wrote last year titled “Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM and Less Like Apple”, I compared the cultures of both companies and how over the past 25 years they had flipped: “Today’s Big Blue is the antithesis of Big Brother. It’s ‘Big Open’. A transparent, nimble, collaborative organization known more for listening and engaging customers than for dictating to them. While ironically, some say Apple now resembles Big Brother given their propensity for tight controls.”

That article and the number of follow on pieces written to support and rebuke my argument stirred up a heated debate that continues... 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 was recently invited to attend the presentations and awards for the Vodafone App Aid competition and to interview Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the event’s judges.

App Aid selected 10 charities who saw the need for a mobile app. App developers signed up for teams that developed apps from scratch in 48 hours for each of the charities. The winning teams received prizes to help them complete and launch their apps. The video below shows brief snippets from the winners.

What struck me while I was watching the charities’ presentations was that the underlying premise of almost all the apps was connecting resources to where they can do the most good.

If we look at the world today there is so much need, and also so many resources that can...

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If you have been following my series, 10 Easy Steps to Social Business, so far then hopefully you’ve gained an understanding of:

1. Embedding social techniques into your business processes with some examples (more to come).
2. The need for customization of your social business solution.
3. Things to think about when preparing a Social Business Governance Plan.

Many thanks for the kind feedback and comments I’ve received so far.  Steps 4 – 6 of the plan will be coming soon.  In the meantime let me keep you busy with my infographic which summarizes the first three steps:

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I was lucky enough to attend the IBM Leadership Alliance conference last week in Boston.  This is an annual gathering of a large number of senior IBM execs, IBM Champions, key customers and a some hangers-on like me.  The entire event is covered by a non-disclosure agreement as the IBMers share their product plans and seek feedback on their plans from the audience.

One session stuck out particularly for me.  It was Sandy Carter‘s presentation on becoming a social business.  Although the precise content of her presentation is under NDA I am allowed to discuss the 10 steps to becoming a social business.  I will examine each of these in a forthcoming series of blog posts but wanted to... Read the article

(Originally posted on Enterprise Strategies: http://enterprisestrategies.com/2012/09/26/improving-organizational-communications/)

To help social business emerge from hype to mainstream adoption, it is important to demystify how social business improves people’s jobs. One area that social business can benefit across a wide range of areas inside of companies is the Communications Plan. Today, communications plans have wide application across many areas of business:

• Projects
• Programs
• Change Management
• Marketing
• Organizational Change (re-orgs)
• Crisis Communications
• Product releases

What is a communications plan?

According to Hieran Publishing a communications plan contains the...

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Last week in San Francisco the world of everything cloud gathered for what, at least according to host Salesforce.com, was the largest tech conference ever. Whether its true or not, it was very well attended, well planned and executed nicely. Dreamforce is always an energetic event and this year was no exception, with celebrity guests like Sir Richard Branson, who did a fireside chat with CEO Marc Benioff and former Secretary of State and retired Gen Colin Powell, entertainment like MC Hammer as part of the opening keynote and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and high profile Salesforce customers like... Read the article

I spent the first part of this week at VMworld, mostly catching up on two acquired products, SocialCast and Zimbra, as well as the Horizon product line. I continue to be impressed with the feature set and depth of the SocialCast product and I have to say that the strategy and direction for the product are really shaping up nicely (more on that in a minute). Along with the barrage of press releases from VMware this week, you may have noticed an announcement from IBM about another acquisition, Kenexa. Now IBM acquiring another application company has become pretty common over the past few years, but this acquisition, I think is interesting more for the implications of strategy than just from the additional assets added to the IBM solution portfolio.

Over the past few years I've focused quite a bit on some emerging technology that falls loosely into the category of social applications. We've gotten more... Read the article

I am often asked how to support social collaboration in the workplace. As I showed in my recent blog post, there are some big differences between learning in an e-business and learning in a social/collaborative business.

So it is not just about adding new social approaches or social media into the training “blend”, supporting social collaboration is underpinned not only by new technologies but by a new mindset.  In other words, it means ..

1 – moving from a focus on organising and managing training (which includes e-learning and blended learning) FOR others, to helping  individuals and teams address their OWN performance problems.

2 – recognising that most learning already happens in the workplace – informally and socially – as people connect and work with one another – as well as outside the organisation in their professional networks. It means...

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Every year since 2006 Jane McConnell releases her report on digital workplace trends which is quite an in-depth piece of work.  The most recent one clocking in at over 150 pages of information with online survey data from over 456 organizations around the world!  Her most recent report looks at both the consumer and employee use of social and collaborative technologies.  While it is quite comprehensive I will extract a few pieces of information which I found to be interesting.

As you can see from the image below most organizations are still at the early stages of their enterprise collaboration initiatives. In our report that we released last year we found the same to be true so it looks like not much has changed here.  Although what does seem to be true is that organizations are starting to move up the ladder of maturity.  While 33% of companies still have fragmented...
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