Anyway, congratulations to the top-3 of the 2009 vintage:

Haven't done any research on any of those, but with a family scattered around the globe from Ethiopia to New Jersey, US and from Greece to Beijing, China, I guess Genoom would make sense for me to try.

I really enjoyed the way the presenter John V. Willshire puts things back in perspective and shows how excess focus on doing fun stuff, trying to get the buzz-machine and rumour-mill rolling, cannot be an end in itself. We really need CMOs to take a more integral view of things, tying strategy to execution on a continuous basis (as opposed to discrete initiatives called "campaigns" - today you're in a campaign every single second) and crucially putting their customers and future customers right at the center of everything they do. Where things get complicated is that nobody should infer from the preceding statement that customers should always be treated as kings and allowed to do as they please without regard for anyone else: sometimes we need to provoke customers, displease them and even frustrate them, in particular when those paths are the best ways to build brand equity.

1. what they promise rocks, period and it's particularly relevant at this point in time with buyers being weary of spending too much
2. the offering stands to put even more pressure on mobile operators whose position is likely to be further undermined by VoIP plays like Skype (now running on some mobile phones) and Jajah. In fact, Jajah + Vopium spells the end of mobile operators' dominant position on the market of mobile connectivity;
3. it would be interesting to consider how Vopium could be combined to open WiFi networks in a logic analogous to Fon as it would definitely have some major appeal for roamers, even though GSM incumbents might not enjoy this that much :)

Anyway, I downloaded the software on my E61i. More in a few days.

The article also presents a simple tool to decide whether a process should be art of science, which the authors call the process matrix (click on the picture to see). This is all music to my ears because it provides some serious academic support to one of the core propositions of BusinessQuests, i.e. that each specific customer requires a highly tailored approach to achieve business progress. The authors of the Let me quote the authors:

"The movement to standardize processes has gone overboard. Some require an artist’s judgment—and should be managed accordingly." - Joseph M. Hall & M. Eric Johnson

Over the years working with innovative as well as more traditional privately owned European companies I realized how unproductive - perhaps even damaging - it can be to even try to express in a standard format like a process flow those processes that make a company different from its competitors. In fact, I came to call this "the spirit of craftsmanship" when facilitating a workshop with customers, which is also one of the reasons why I enjoyed so thoroughly Small Giants (more on that some other day or on my reading list on my profile). That's precisely one of the points made by the authors of the article and again, let me quote:

"What we call “art” is often described as “judgment-based work,” “craft work,” or “professional work.” The common thread in such work is variability in the process, its inputs, and its outputs. Art is needed in changeable environments (for example, when raw materials aren’t uniform and therefore require a craftsperson’s adjustments) and when customers value distinctive or unique output (in other words, all customers don’t want the product or service to perform or be performed the same way)."

The article mentions the following domains as areas in which processes ought to be treated as art rather than science precisely because much of the value they produce results from the flexibility and adaptability of the process to a given business environment:

• leadership training... so much for the established methodologies that are supposed to produce your next generation of leaders mechanically and perhaps also the analysis of Hall & Johnson should prompt companies to completely review the way they manage women for leadership: the processes they now have were written far too long ago by men, for men and in a logic of dominant alpha leadership (in its most idiotic form it is also known as the "W" style) and the attributes they seek to develop in the leaders of tomorrow are just completely misplaced
• auditing, which comes as a huge surprise when you think of the job as it's done by the big-5, no make that 4, no make that 3... until the next big Barings or Enron-class blunder... but is no surprise at all if you've been in the shoes of the auditor or due diligence contributor identifying problem areas in ways that you could only explain after uncovering the problem (it's a bit like creative inspiration in a way)
• hedge fund management and that's one that only half a year back could have surprised me too, but not after reading Taleb's Fooled By Randomness...
• customer service, which might come as a surprise, but not if you've ever had to deal with off-shored customer service departments who do their work perfectly decently... but fail to really help you
• software development, which speaks volumes about why agile approaches like scrum work so well
• account relationship management, which says a lot about the challenge to recruit good people to do that job
• business development, which comes as no surprise if you've ever come across people who can generate pretty transformative ideas by simply discussing with you about your business model, something that BusinessQuests has been doing over the past decade or so (not that I want to pat myself in the back, but I'm sure you'll understand how happy I was to see this area mentioned in the article)
• industrial design, not surprising at all

I would probably add a few, which I'm sure are in the research (now impatient to read the book if these guys decide to publish one on this topic):

• social marketing
• interactive marketing
• architect's services
• financial engineering, i.e. building the financial vehicles and structures that allow business to achieve its purposes
• tax services
• legal services

For the past fifteen years I've been in contact with friends and B-school alumni working for finance departments in quoted companies who had a mission every end of quarter: make sure their company's figures reached or exceeded the expectations of analysts working for major investment banks and brokers... So at least once a quarter their mission had nothing to do with their company's core business and everything to do with window dressing, to call thing the way they are. And of course poor implementation of standing legislation as well as bringing poor new legislative measures into force (read Sarbanes-Oxley) did nothing to improve things... which is why I wanted to share this video.

Here are a few of their most noteworthy points:

• while there have been crises before, this one is like no other because of the speed of information processing that we now have
• according to Colmant the roots of this crisis are in the Internet bust of the early part of this century (needless to say it's an assertion that had me raise my eyebrows)
• Defeyt made a passionate case against established practices of trade liberalization without any effort being done to bring better coherence to labor and fiscal legislations of trading partners
• both panelists expressed concern that the consequences of the current period could be social unrest similar to what we now see in Greece
• panelists agreed that the causes of this mess are in the US and that the collapse of Lehman Brothers prevented this crisis from hitting Europe much more than it does. According to them the extent of the banking problems is significantly smaller in Europe compared to the US
• Defeyt and Colmant felt that the lack of trust of citizens for established institutions, be it banks or governments is cause for real concern and probably the single biggest impediment to relatively quick recovery
• they also both agreed on the principle that nothing should be done to help the auto industry because its future is behind us at least insofar as its current form is concerned. Interestingly they mentionned that there's production overcapacity in the range of 30% to 35%
• Colmant made a vibrant case in favor of market mechanisms claiming that markets are efficient for letting supply and demand meet to define the fair price of assets, something that had Defeyt react by saying that there's a host of resources that are used by the economy, which are completely unaccounted for. Defeyt also questionned the way in which economic prosperity is measured in our countries and claimed that we should be looking for free circulation of people, ideas and culture, not products because it does not make economic-ecologic sense to be transporting vegetables across Europe when they could be sold on markets closer to the place of production
• the audience had a couple of very interesting questions about the extent to which Adam Smith's vision is actually verified in the real world, whether the market is relaly efficient considering irrational jumps in prices of assets, whether China is where the world economy's salvation will come from...

Overall good stuff and an interesting evening although I doubt anyone got out of the room with clear answers. One of the reasons why we put totether a participative site on Ning to give attendees an opportunity to continue the discussion and access photos, video and notes from the event. I am curious to see whether people will start conversations and see the opportunity to take an active part in this crucial public debate...

For me this has been a great way to test how a more conservative audience of late adopters of technology reacts to the usage of tools like Amiando (excellent stuff) for setting-up the conference or Ning after the conference. Furthermore, we ran a survey on SurveyMonkey about the economic situation, its causes according to the audience and the assessment of the quality of information people got from the media and from banks. A vast majority of the people (we polled about 30% of the attendees) were really unhappy with the way banks handled the matters pertaining to the crisis. I'll publish some of the conclusions later this week.

Below is a mind map hosted at WiseMapping, but it's in French, the language of the conference.