SOCIAL BUSINESS NOW

WarrenDaly.PeaceMakersInc@gmail.com — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:27:00 +0000

5 Challenges Social Business Will Face

Published on Harvard Business Review
A recent survey conducted by Proofpoint found that 8% of companies had terminated employees due to social media usage (common causes including sharing sensitive information on a network). And while the statistic seems significant, it only underscores one of several upcoming challenges nearly every organization will face as changes in people, process and technology fueled by the collective movement we call social media begin to transform business. Here are a few challenges that every organization should be planning for right now. If you aren't you will be.

1. Integration
Becoming a social business can impact nearly every function of a business. Marketing, PR, communications—even supply chain and any function that deals with employees. So where does it live? Is it a department? Do organizations hire a "Chief Social Officer" much like they would a Chief Technology Officer? All organizations will eventually grapple with integrating social somehow into their entire ecosystem adopting either centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches.

2. Governance
Many organizations now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the internet will be. The good, the bad, the ugly. And this includes content produced not only from the general public, but also from internal constituents such as employees. Organizations will not only need to begin actively listening so that they are in the know, but they will need rules of engagement for how they deal with multiple types of scenarios from responding to a compliment to dealing with a detractor to following up with an employee who just posted something inappropriate or sensitive.

3. Culture
All organizations fall somewhere on a spectrum of being "open" or "closed" meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally. Consider that it's probable that the Zappos purchase by Amazon had a good deal to do with their notoriously open culture. Likewise, even Apple which can be notoriously secretive is benefiting by leveraging a strategy that opened up their iPhone application ecosystem. Sure Apple has a great deal of control over it, but for the first time in history—they have legions of people developing applications which run on their hardware. Organizations have the potential to benefit from embracing customers, employees etc. but will have to manage it intelligently and with purpose.

4. Human Resources
In order to transform from a business to a social business, (meaning true participation as opposed to leveraging social media as a new form of marketing), businesses are going to have to upgrade their HR protocols, as well as legal. And it's likely to be a never-ending process as new technologies continually hit the scene. Before there was Twitter, companies scrambled to publish blogging guidelines for employees, now the wrong tweet or Facebook status can get you fired. Organizations will not only need to update guidelines but actually train their people who may be leveraging social technologies for work. Customer service in particular comes to mind.

5. Measurement & ROI
Every organization will continue to struggle with how results get measured and how ROI is reported. Philosophically, this question can be answered with another question: "what's the ROI of e-mail"? But it's a question that won't go away. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives such as attention (the size or number of participants actively engaged) or authority (the amount of influence a participant has in the ecosystem). Because social business is enabled by technology, it is by definition measurable. However, tying it to revenue made or saved becomes more of a challenge.

There's more, but I think these represent some big ones. What are your thoughts?

The Health Benefits Of Sweet Potato

WarrenDaly.PeaceMakersInc@gmail.com — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:10:00 +0000

Cool!! Just ate a bunch last nite!! Anyone want a really cool recipe?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

WarrenDaly.PeaceMakersInc@gmail.com — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:04:00 +0000

Is LOHAS the Business Culture of the Future?

For the last 250 years, we have been living in what Peter Senge calls the “industrial age bubble”, based on a “take, make, waste” worldview. Behind this way of life has been a set of attitudes and beliefs about economics, wealth, and business. We tend to think of these beliefs as “common sense”, or even as objective natural law. But in fact, they are received knowledge, the inheritance of centuries of cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Our way of business is based on learned behavior, not natural law.

With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.

Since the 1960’s, there has been an increasing counter-cultural rejection of this worldview, and a declaration of the value of healthy food and lifestyles, social justice and environmental sustainability. New generations of LOHAS entrepreneurs have emerged – people who express those values with distinctly capitalist solutions for improving quality of life.

Is there a distinctively “LOHAS” business model?

Does having a healthy, sustainable product imply having a healthy, sustainable business culture to produce it? Are LOHAS businesses really run differently from “conventional” businesses? I believe the answer is YES.

I’ve been interviewing business leaders in the LOHAS sector for the last two years, and have more recently begun sharing these conversations on internet radio. There are common threads in these stories, threads very different from what I was taught in business school 25 years ago.

A New Metaphor – Business as a Living System

The models we use to visualize business, far from being abstract business school stuff, are actually critical. The metaphors we use to describe the world inform our sense of what is real, our ability to imagine possibilities, and the choices we make. If we think the world is a machine, a fundamentally meaningless bunch of stuff, we see and act accordingly.

“Common sense” in the modern world emphasizes the separation of the self from nature, and a linear notion of cause and effect. This shows up in business planning models that view markets and organizations as machines, to be “managed” via command and control.

The business metaphor is changing from that of a linear, mechanical system to a complex, biological one. Your business environment is more like a forest than a set of gears. As a result, today’s emerging business planning models imagine enterprises as interdependent networks of resilient, individual players. Processes of planning and change are not straight lines from A to B, but cycles involving action, learning and adaptation.

Valuing Multiple Stakeholders

If you see your business environment as a machine, you want to improve your ability to manipulate it. If you view your business environment as a forest, you see a variety of plants and animals that behave according to their own rules, rules that you need to understand and respect.

In the industrial age model, business exists solely to make a profit for shareholders. LOHAS strategies begin with the intention to respect the values and needs of all the stakeholders they touch. The forest is only healthy if all the plants and animals in it are healthy. The value of a business model is maximized when all the players – investors, suppliers, employees, consumers, communities - benefit from being a part of it. And in a surprising number of cases, returns to investors are just as good or better.

Collaboration and Trust

Industrial age systems get people to work together by command and control, carrots and sticks. Networked organizations require greater skill to enable people to collaborate. Why is this essential? In a complex world, no one person can see the whole picture. Wise leaders tap into the collective intelligence and motivation around them. This means building trust.

Effective collaboration requires trust in order to creatively innovate and solve problems, negotiate healthy win-win agreements, and manage performance based on agreement rather than on power.

Head, Heart and Hands

It’s striking how many LOHAS leaders benefit from practices like yoga and meditation. These practices develop personal resilience and creativity, integrate mind and body, and enable one to act confidently within that more complex view of reality. We often use the term “authenticity” to describe this way of being.

To be authentic is to know and act from the heart, as well as the head. In the language of the heart, having the right questions is more valuable than having all the answers. Authenticity is a confident, wholehearted state of being that puts all these ideas into practice – purpose, complexity, interconnectedness, respect, and collaboration.

Is LOHAS the business culture of the future? If evolution is about adapting to greater and greater levels of complexity and intelligence, I believe it will be.

Dan Montgomery is a professional management consultant who helps entrepreneurs in the Natural Products and Clean Energy Technology sectors plan and develop businesses to make their ideas happen. Dan is host of the internet talk radio show Sustainable Leadership at www.blogtalkradio.com/sustainableleadership, and writes a text blog at www.sustainableleadership.wordpress.com

future culture - LOHAS

WarrenDaly.PeaceMakersInc@gmail.com — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:47:00 +0000

future culture - LOHAS

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Muhammad Yunus: Building Social Business Ventures (preview)

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