The kids were sleeping in the backseats as our loaded down Sequoia traversed the winding road over the sheer cliffs that drop down into the vast and rugged Pacific coastline. I asked my wife in a whisper to do a little bit of research for our pending arrival in San Francisco. After punching on her iPhone for a minute, she whispered back that there was no signal.

No signal? A combination of relief and mild panic immediately ensued.

I couldn’t find out what the parking alternatives to our hotel in San Francisco were, or make dinner plans, or schedule a route through the city that my boys had never visited before. I wouldn’t be receiving any inbound messages or notifications from my social networks. Worse yet, what if something unexpected were to happen on our journey? What if we broke down? What if there were some crazy people around the corner waiting to accost us? What if our trip was delayed late into the night and we were to become stranded? (I have the counter argument to all of these questions coming in a future post).

We were disconnected. And for a moment, I experienced a sudden jolt of Nomophobia.

The Tragedy of the Disconnected

I recently re-read the tragic account of the famous Donner party and how many of them died when trying to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains to California because there was too much snow. In today’s world, the tragedy likely never would have happened.

The party was traveling a new trail that had been recommended to them. The portion of party that took the tried and true trail from Illinois all arrived safely. But nearly half of the 87 people who attempted the new trail died in a tragedy that included murder, cannibalism, and starvation. They died for several reasons. They died because they didn’t know the terrain. They died because there was too much snow that fell. They died because they were essentially disconnected from the people, utilities, and critical information that could and should have saved them.

If the trip had been attempted today, they would have likely had access to GPS signals. They would have been able to access weather predictions. They would likely have access to an army of input that had been shared by those who had gone before them. They would have been able to travel the path of the previous trail, even though it was covered with snow. This knowledge would have largely been enabled by technology; by satellites, sensors, and computing power, most of it likely accessible through mobile devices through the cloud. If they fell into unexpected trouble, they likely would have been able to send a note or call for help via their mobile phone. (If not available now, it will be in the foreseeable future).

Connection Innovations

Today I read about a new app called Watch Over Me. Its growth has outpaced most of the popular social networks in Malaysia. Why? Because it helps people feel safe. It is persistent connection that in this case allows people to feel a little bit safer, and to respond immediately in the case of danger.

We’ve witnessed the network effect of the telegraph, telephone, fax, email, social networks. As things become connected, the potential benefits and outcomes grow exponentially. With the addition of every new node in the network, the value to both the network and the node increases.

On April Fool’s Day (less than 3 months ago), a different app was developed as a joke in 8 hours. The sole purpose of the app was to send the message “yo”. Since that time, a few remarkable things have happened:

In the last couple of months, over 2 million people have downloaded this app, and the founders recently received $1.2 million in funding. While some mock this as an after effect of Silicon Valley greed and hubris, it tells a story of how something with very small utility spread across a network can reap large gains.

Furthermore, this semingly near useless utility has now been re-tooled to potentially save lives in the Gaza strip. Watch the video below for more details.

Not to be outdone, Yo’s short term success has spawned the creation of a new app called Tap, which aims to be even simpler than Yo. Both of these are two small examples of the trend towards “Micro Everything” – discussed in a previous post.

Connection breeds Opportunity

The point of this post is not to promote or marvel at the absurdity of these apps, or to argue if there is any true benefit to them… OR whether those benefits will be sustained or evolve over time. (Twitter was met with a similar response when it was first launched).

The primary point is that with connection comes increased opportunity, not only on a 1:1 scale, but also on a 1:many, many:many, and all of the subsequent derivatives by extending these connections out by one additional dimension. (ie. 1:many:1, many:many:1, 1:1:many).

The essence of creativity is identifying new patterns, spawning new ideas, creating new uses, mashups, and interpretations of what has been done before. As more things become connected, an immensely larger canvas for creativity is unleashed.

It’s limitlessness is ironically a new boundary that we will continue to see increase and evolve. We’ll explore this as well in future posts.

As the world becomes more connected, we’ll continue to see advancement of previously unimagined efficiencies and smart interpretations in home automation, supply chain automation, agriculture, medicine, and healthcare.

As more nodes are connected, the greater value the network has. Inversely, the more connections, the more value the network provides to each individual.

In short, connection brings opportunity at an exponential scale.

As people, cars, buildings, homes, cities, and most everything else become more connected, how will you evolve your organization to thrive in this new environment?

This post is brought to you by InnovateThink and Cisco.

The post Connection brings Opportunity at Exponential Scale appeared first on Value Creator.

I’ve included the entire deck below. Below are some brief accompanying thoughts:

Customers have unprecedented speed and access to anything and anyone from anywhere. This is dramatically shifting customer expectations, and continues to do so as new innovations continue to be absorbed into the mobile landscape. As technology races on, and the lines between the digital and physical are increasingly blurred, many executives are that I speak with are simply dumbfounded by the monumental task ahead of them to retrench the way that commercial institutions have been operating for decades. Most don’t express it exactly that way. It’s simply written on their face. It’s simply overwhelming to consider how expectations will change when wearables and ambient technology become more ingrained into the mainstream. Recent history tells us that this may happen sooner than we think. Many organizations still feel unprepared to deal with the reality of 2010, let alone 2014 or 2015.

During my presentation, I mentioned 3 organizations that were doing innovative things to leverage technology to better serve customers. Enterasys, with it’s ISAAC system – Barclaycard –with its innovative Barclaycard Ring product, and Amazon, specifically with its pending release of “Mayday”.

I polled the audience “How many of you spent more last year with Amazon than you did five years ago?” Approximately ¾ of the audience raised their hands. When I asked “Why” – many of them replied – Amazon Prime. Amazon does an amazing job of making shopping easy – from discovery to check out, payment, and delivery. But none of those reasons are why I included Amazon in my presentation today.

I mentioned Amazon because of its pending Mayday service. The more I contemplate this, the more significant it becomes.

For those unfamiliar with the service, Mayday will be shipping with its new Kindle DX product in a few weeks. They’ll be offering a live customer service representative on demand in streaming video with capabilities to take over the device within 15 seconds. A live streaming person, in context with the ability to help as if they were sitting right there with you in less than 15 seconds!

Compare that with the traditional IVR and a 20 minute hold time that has drawn the ire of customers for so long and is increasingly driving them to digital self service channels. (special thanks to Kate Leggett and the Forrester team for the following data points).

If Amazon is able to successfully execute on this promise, it holds the potential to rewire an entire industry. As delivery matures, it holds the potential to render the traditional IVR extinct, to which nary a customer would object to, though a slew of technology vendors would.

As I look around, I see too many companies still wrestling with solving yesterday’s problems, woefully doing their best to survive, while the speed of technology renders their efforts irrelevant.

Amazon is not without its share of mistakes, but it has done so well for so long, that it was rated as the most trusted brand in a recent Harris poll.

So how should organizations respond to the rapid changes coming down the pipe? “Sense and respond” capabilities are becoming increasingly critical, requiring organizations to increase specific organizational capabilities:

(1) Understand customers more deeply
(2) Continue to learn more about customer journeys and recognize that for most organizations, there are a near unlimited amount of journeys, but they take place across the same primary outposts.
(3) Create and shape “playgrounds” for customers to interact with at their preference, with meaningful offers of value exchange at each step

Organizations should be investing in the following:

– Evolving towards a more experience focused culture
– Capturing, merging, and analyzing broader, more unstructured data
– Increased teaming and collaboration across organizational functions and touchpoints
– Translating data into insights
– Leveraging those insights to operationalize value creating recommendations and responses

The post Keynote Recap: How technology is reshaping human behavior (and what you should be doing about it) appeared first on Value Creator.

Laughter broke out.

Forty five minutes later, the Atlanta Falcon’s RB Stephen Jackson stumbled into the endzone against his former team to the deafening roar of the Georgia Dome that my friend and Atlanta local Dave Ryan hilariously describes as “part rap concert, part strip club, and part video game”.

As the flow of the game took over, and less exciting moments ensued, I began to consider why 60,000 people would pay a hundred dollars or more per person to come here when the view and convenience of watching a game with a 60 inch High Definition may arguably be better.

And why was I even here in Atlanta in the first place? I mean, other than to be amused by a cacophony of jeers and comments directed at the leader of our entourage, Brent Leary, who on this day was a bold and lonely Eric-Dickerson-jersey-wearing Rams fan, in a sea of red and black.

Left to Right: Joe Hughes, Accenture, Craig Downing, SAP, Ray Wang, Constellation Research, Brent Leary, Brian Vellmure, Bryan Kramer

In a seeming twist of irony, I had flown to congregate with hundreds of digital leaders who regularly trumpet the benefits of social media. Wouldn’t social media have been a better channel, err… platform to talk about social media?

With all this access to devices and media, why are people still spending gobs of money and time to do things the old-fashioned way and meet with people?

Right or wrong, we’re increasingly in pursuit of what’s scarce and unique. The chance to meet with a high density of folks committed to your interest and passion is difficult to duplicate, and for most people, it’s rare. It’s how relationships are formed and accelerated. Relationships and the trust within them are how business gets done.

In a ever growing sea of content, it’s the exceptional that gets amplified. Unique, helpful, remarkable is what gets shared. But as access to news, books, blogs, media, becomes more ubiquitous, unique, helpful, and remarkable is becoming rarer.

The Real Purpose of this Post

I was privileged to be a panelist on a session titled “Can you build a better advocate through social media?”, with Anneke Seley, Emily Yellin, and Natascha Thomson, moderated by Kai Petzelt, and creatively crowdsourced by SAP.

Left to Right: Kai Petzelt, Anneke Seley, Natascha Thomson, Emily Yellin, Brian Vellmure

The session title introduces an important question – “Can you build a better advocate through social media?”

The real answers, I believe, has little to do with social media and most everything to do with psychology, sociology, and the fundamentals of what drives human behavior. There was some great dialogue about incentives, behaviors, and empowerment for advocates.

So far mentioned in this panel discussion: @bjfogg @danariely @DanielPink #ssuadvocate

— Ric Dragon (@RicDragon) September 17, 2013

The same thing that drove people to attend a professional sporting event, is a similar thing that drove people to attend a social media focused business conference, and perhaps more importantly, the same thing that drove hundreds and thousands of them to share their experience(s) of both on social networks.

The common thread is that the experience is somewhat remarkable, different, and unique from most people’s day to day. (Successful) sharing happens based on the merit of your product, service, and/or content. Apple is one of the most mentioned and shared brands on social channels, yet they do very little proactively on social media. Their masses use social media to propagate their own messages and affinity for the iconic brand. Would a focused program on amplifying and accelerating these messages help? Likely. But the lack of a proactive didn’t stop over 5 million social mentions about the launch of iOS7.

@BrianVellmure quoted by @jasondominy #ssuadvocate #SocialShakeUp pic.twitter.com/NqbNJPwrWf

— Naully Nicolas (@naullyn) September 17, 2013

You may have heard the controversial saying “Advertising is a tax for being unremarkable”. I love that quote. It’s not universally true, nor is it gospel. However, it’s a mental anchor that properly frames what successful organizations already know. We can’t just shout louder to increase revenue. The return on advertising spend offers diminishing returns as we broaden to less targeted channels. At some point, you’re pushing on a string. In a more fragmented world where long tails dominate, this rings truer than ever before.

Conversely, everywhere I look, I’m actually seeing and hearing about increased social media advertising budgets. Advertising is paying for privilege, for immediate access to an audience. It’s a “reach accelerator”. It works, and determining the right mix of owned, earned, and paid is still a top priority for marketers. In a socially connected world, amplifying the remarkable happens at exponential speed. Coupling the speed and reach of digital networks with something that is truly worth talking about is a match made in heaven.

The Valid Counterargument

The counterargument that I’ve heard several times before and was presented by a fellow panelist is that in some cases, being remarkable just isn’t practical, so how do we amplify what we’ve got? It’s a very common, real and practical question. The problem is that if you’re not remarkable, or unique, or constantly adding value, you’re done. Markets will gobble you up as evidenced by the struggling list of the 65 US companies that were on the Fortune 500 in 2003 and are not there today.

As I learned early on in sports; “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse”. Someone else is working harder than you are right now. Other organizations increasingly have access to your talent, your customers, your capabilities. It’s why the turnover rate in the Fortune 500, S&P 500, and every measure of corporate “who’s who” continues to get faster.

Yelling louder about mediocre offerings (message, service, or product), simply isn’t the answer. I’d gladly take an 80% return (80/20 rule) on a rapidly growing pie, than focusing on tactics to move our response and conversion rates a few percentage points on a stagnant or shrinking pie.

*** Have some thoughts about customer advocacy or advocacy on Social Media? Sound off here. It’s an important topic and we’re collectively still in the process of understanding more about it.

Robin Carey and the Social Media Today team deserve huge props for putting on a great event. Below is some other feedback from the Twitterverse during the session:

Love this RT @jasondominy: "It's not just about being remarkable, you have to market the remarkable." @nathomson #ssuadvocate #SocialShakeUp

— PeopleLinx (@PeopleLinx) September 17, 2013

"You have to pay attention to influencers, but don't do that to the exclusion of everyone else." @EYellin #SocialShakeUp #ssuadvocate

— Dan Gingiss (@dgingiss) September 17, 2013

Good discussion about the integrity of advocates & advocacy at #ssuadvocate panel. Thx all. #SocialShakeUp

— Sam Fiorella (@samfiorella) September 17, 2013

This panel is amazing, in that they are truly challenging each other one very thought. #ssuadvocate #SocialShakeUp

— Jason Dominy (@jasondominy) September 17, 2013

Real discussion taking place here on advocates #ssuadvocate #socialshakeup via @MarchellGillis <no surprise, these are real thought leaders

— Margot Heiligman (@mheiligman) September 17, 2013

Build a better advocate ROCKED!! Great interactive throw down! #ssuadvocate #SocialShakeUp

— Cay (@CayBee22) September 17, 2013

The post Driving Customer Advocacy in a Social World: Reflections from #SocialShakeUp appeared first on Value Creator.

I declared then (and prior) that Social CRM would soon go away and just go back to being called CRM. This week, Paul Greenberg, author of the Best Selling “CRM at the Speed of Light”, and widely recognized as the “Godfather of CRM” declared that time has come in his 5 part series posted over on Diginomica.

Why does this matter? It matters because it highlights the maturity and adoption of the channel and capabilities of interaction into core thinking. While many of the benefits and tenets that we were exploring about social (and social crm) 3,4,5,6 years ago, we are now exploring across a broader array of technologies and interactions along the entire digital spectrum. Social is both a subset of digital, and CRM (and HR, and Sales, and Marketing, and Customer Service, and, and, and, and…). From an organizational perspective, social is an enabler of core business processes, not a standalone with its own benefits. It’s taken a while for the industry to get there, but we finally see this reflected in the product and messaging direction of many of the large enterprise vendors (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.)

Bob’s full question about whether CRM is technology, or strategy, or both is one that has been repeated and debated a ton over the past 2 decades. In can perhaps be answered in the quote below that has been attributed to both Marshall McLuhan and Father John Culkin.

“We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”

As this relates to CRM (and other domains tightly associated with technology), there appears is an accordion effect. Strategy and process are enabled by technology. Then disruptive technology emerges that changes the landscape, forcing (or enabling) changes in process and strategy.

Nonetheless, the dialogue and debate is useful and interesting. In re-reading some of the comments, I am simultaneously amused that the industry has moved so far, but so little over the past few years.

Below are my comments from March 2010. The last line is arguably more relevant now than it was then.

At some point, the title Social CRM goes away. It is
just CRM. Just like eBusiness is really just business. For the time
being, Social helps to differentiate the future from the past.

Related to your Strategy/Technology question: I have wrestled with
this as well. I am and have always been a proponent of defining your
organizational and customer strategy first, aligning people and
process second, and then selecting and implementing the appropriate
technologies to support the defined strategy and processes.

So, let’s say its 2003 and that you’ve done all of that perfectly.
Here’s where in this case, things might be slightly different than then.

Enter the social web and while it may not initially change
organizational or CRM strategy all that much, the tactics by which
that strategy is executed probably does change.

The social web has introduced amplifiers to business models in
general. The ability to find and engage prospects and customers
talking about your products and services has greatly been increased
(Social Media Monitoring). Listening, analyzing and acting
appropriately can provide significant returns (or at least deflect
losses).

It has also given prospects, customers, influencers, etc. a megaphone
by which they may share information about your company. Provide value
at any point in the dialogue and that value will likely be shared
throughout social networks. (case in point – Ray and Jeremiah’s paper)

Returns on a customer centric strategy are now exponential – good and
bad. Organizations that try to engage in a social world with the old
one way marketing message will have marginal success. Those who have
already aligned their business models with their customers (and have
moved towards an outside-in model) will experience exponential success
because of the opportunities that the social technologies provide.

And now to come full circle back to your question. For those
organizations who never got CRM in the first place, the widespread
growth and adoption of social technology that is literally changing
the fabric of society is so disruptive that it may actually dictate a
change in strategy for many organizations. In the long term, it seems
likely that the impact of the social web will force more organizations
to change the way they function or they will simply fail. The market
is becoming smarter and more efficient, and those that don’t respond
will die.

The post Social CRM is dead. appeared first on Value Creator.

Brian Vellmure – Backpacking in the Himalayas. 2004

In 1856, buzz grew as people first began to hear that the tallest peak in the world had been identified in the remote kingdom of Tibet. Mount Everest was officially measured to be over 29,000 feet and the thought of standing on top of the world appealed to adventurers the world over. The first real (documented) attempt to climb to the peak was in 1921, with a 3rd and notable attempt by Andrew Irvine and George Mallory in 1924. Mallory’s body was not found until 1999 and Irvine’s has never been found. No one knows if they ever reached the peak, but on Britain’s 9th expedition in 1953, New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the peak for first time, and are widely regarded as heroes. In 1978, Reinhold Messner (Italy) and Peter Habeler (Austria) made the first ascent without supplemental oxygen. The following year, Messner was the first to do the whole thing by himself. Since then, an 80 year old man, a 73 year old woman, and a 13 year old girl have all ascended and stood at the top of the world. Apa Sherpa has reached the summit an amazing 20 times.

Exploring and mapping new routes, leveraging improvements in technology and communications, training, and absorbing and applying lessons learned by thousands of pioneers before them has led to a slow and steady explosion of people across the world who can claim that they have reached the peak of the mountain formerly called Called Chomolungma in Tibet and Sagarmatha in Nepal.

In fact, during the past half century, more than 3,500 people have reached the peak, more than 10% of them have reached the peak in the last year alone. And since, climbing to the top has almost become commonplace, Valery Rozov decided to be the first to base jump (video) off Everest just a few weeks ago.

Reaching the Social Business Summit

I have no doubt, that leveraging social and collaborative technologies have a similar future for those who can understand and harness the power of digital interactions. A future of massive success, build on collaborative networks, and rapid innovation, where the lessons and experiments of the early explorers are passed on, and course corrections are made along the way. We’re currently in the equivalent of 1960’s or 1970’s on the Everest timeline from a progress perspective. Proven successes. Some best practices are emerging, but the best is still yet to come.

McKinsey & Company’s 2012 184 page study highlighted that up to $1.3 Trillion may be created by leveraging social technologies. It’s important to highlight that their research and estimates only included analysis of 4 sectors, which infers that the potential for value creation is much higher.

IBM also recently published a useful paper titled “Social Business: Patterns in achieving social business success by leading and pioneering organizations” The diagram below highlights ways that social has actually already created measurable business value.

So What’s the Problem?

You see, there are a few giant crevasses that stand in the way of most social business endeavors. Not many people want to talk about them, either because they’re still evangelizing or they’ve quit on the whole idea and labeled it ineffective nonsense.

Some data points:

(1) 77% of employees never use their enterprise social network, and only 3% use it once each day. (Forrester Research)

(2) A recent survey found that “96% of respondents indicated that there was no meaningful integration between what the company was doing externally and internally with their social collaboration platforms.” (IBM)

—> Value isn’t being realized because social and core business functions are still detached.

The towering peak of success is bright and visible in the distance, but the winds, freezing weather, and lack of oxygen still stand before us. It took 30 years and 13 attempts to for a human to successfully get to the peak of Everest and back down. Fortunately for us, innovation cycle times are short and getting shorter.

There are 3 huge crevasses to that still need to be successfully crossed for most organizations to make the a successful ascent towards the Social Business Summit.

Leadership Evolution

A large majority of today’s leaders grew up in a different era. Leadership is evolving. Contrary to what some would argue, I still believe leadership still matters, even as we progress towards a networked world increasingly being able to leverage swarm intelligence. But since the old models of organizations are not equipped to handle the rapid shifts in markets, leadership is taking on a different face altogether. The ability to find, harness, inspire, and mobilize new and existing networks to respond to rapidly evolving needs in a fluid landscape is not a core capability that exists in most of today’s leadership. If the old paradigm and understanding are deeply embedded at the top, the ladder across the crevasse won’t be built. In order for the chasm to be crossed, leadership must adapt and evolve from managing a strict command and control hierarchy to forming and managing dynamic networks of content and talent.

Cultural Transformation

Hand in hand with the evolution of leadership, most workers today have been taught to learn something and then do what they’re told to do, in a repetitive fashion. Traditional knowledge workers work in a siloed environment with a narrow scope of knowledge and contacts. The evolution towards a networked organization that is constantly learning and can sense and respond in near real time requires that a new culture of connectors and sharers be cultivated. As the research shows, if the culture of sharing and learning and connecting doesn’t exist, new capabilities will be under utilized.

Technology integration

It’s slowly becoming consensus (finally!) that in order for social or collaborative technologies to be truly meaningful, they must be tightly integrated with the existing flow of work and core business functions. Social, when most effective, is a layer that enables speed and amplification across the core functions of a business, both externally and internally. While this will mature over the next several years, organizations moving forward who can weave social technologies into the existing flow of work will experience a steeper trajectory up the mountain.

In the next post, we’ll address how to build bridges (ladders) to successfully cross the crevasses.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

The post Ascending towards the Social Business Summit appeared first on Value Creator.

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 a negative return. Fueled by craze and hype, we see valuable resources misallocated, resulting in personal and organizational demise.

As I’ve traveled around the globe, I’ve realized that most people are relatively similar. They work. They eat. They play. They spend time with family and friends and they generally just want to be loved and respected. Whether we’re in Switzerland or Bolivia or Thailand, we all do and want similar things, although these often manifest themselves in slightly different ways. These differences are more pronounced on the edges and that’s where we seem to focus our attention. Everyone in California surfs. Everyone in Texas is a cowboy. Everyone in Manhattan works on Wall Street. We amplify differences because they are…interesting, and attempt to make sense of the world around us.

Highlighted in several past studies, the media effect amplifies the spread and perception of these differences, while influencing where many of us spend our attention.

Images, videos, infographics, blogs, and tweets spreading quickly via network messengers have the propensity to create their own reality as they spread. Many of these Ideaviruses are more potent than they’ve ever been, influencing their recipients in new and different ways that the average citizen can’t quite put their finger on yet.

For creators of ideas, digital content or products, the potential to leverage the effects of emerging digital networks holds tremendous promise. We’ve never experienced a world where billions of people can connect to billions of people instantly. Conversely, as a recipient, the amount of information racing through our streams can be daunting.

Business leaders have the unenviable position of trying separate the signals from the noise, which is increasingly easier said than done.

In an era where the impact and exposure to digital objects, ideas, and content can be exponentially amplified in near real time, how can we know which reverberations will continue to grow louder and more important, and which echoes will simply come and go as quickly as they came, replaced by the next reverberation of the times?

The irony and convincing truth is that some of the things bubbling up from the edges actually matter a lot. In fact, all of the things listed in the opening of this post ARE very important, which is why I spend so much time studying, sharing, and consulting in each of those domains. The people who recognize them first are usually able to capitalize on them the most. One could argue that the only places ripe for innovation in the coming era are indeed the edges, since we continue to normalize innovations with increasing efficiency.

A significant challenge, then, is not whether to recognize or not, or to adopt or not. Those options are too rudimentary and crude. The real issue is how much weight to apply to each of these new technologies and opportunities that present themselves. Not enough, and you will indeed likely fall behind. Overweight the shiny new objects and your core will suffer, and perhaps terminally. The answer to this, my friends, is highly contextual.

On one end of the continuum are the uber-pragmatists who ignore everything new, holding tightly to the traditional until overwhelmingly proven otherwise. On the other end are those who see promise in everything, chasing trends, and bouncing from one idea to another without ever focusing on what really matters. The herd of echo chamber enthusiasts bounce from idea to idea, trumpeting to each other and dancing to the beat of the next new thing.

As we strive for balance between focusing on what matters most while simultaneously keeping a keen eye fixed on emerging opportunities, here are some guidelines that might be helpful:

• (1) Remind yourself that the fundamentals of business likely won’t change. It’s almost never “different this time”.
• (2) If you don’t have a solid use case or two, the latest shiny gadget likely isn’t likely for you (at least not yet).
• (3) Recognize that the “Outlier Amplifier” effect is alive and well. The fringes are repeatedly over-exaggerated to satisfy the media’s gluttonous quest for eyeballs (every company is a media company). In the race for attention, those seeking it will often exaggerate for effect. It’s also important to note that there are no qualifications required to setup a blog, twitter, or youtube account. Sift shrewdly.
• (4) No one knows your business as well as you do. Seek to continually understand your prospects and customers better, and systematically build and align your capabilities to create and provide more value for them. This guiding principle will help stay focused on what matters most for you and your organization now and for the foreseeable future.

What else would you add to this list?

The post What REALLY Matters Now? Beware of “Outlier Amplifiers” appeared first on Value Creator.

At the start of each session, I encouraged contact center and customer experience executives from American Express, Disney, Coca-Cola, Staples, eBay, JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Discover, and several other organizations to commit with me to ask great questions together for the balance of the afternoon.

We are in an era where asking great questions, and collectively pursuing answers together is a necessity. The accelerating pace of technological innovation is disrupting every industry, every best practice, and democratizing opportunity across the globe. The concepts of the learning organization continue to gain traction and has fueled much of the Enterprise 2.0 / Social Business movement over the past decade.

I asked the respective audience(s) in Orlando, Austin, and Salt Lake City to consider the following:

From there, we discussed two major trends:

1. Greater Connectedness

Fundamentally, the reasons that humans connect haven’t changed in millennia. We still share our names, where we’re from, what we do, our interests, preferences, who we know, what we like to do. We form communities of interest, or passion, or purpose. What has changed is that for the first time in the history of the world, billions of people can connect with billions of people.

• Connections between humans are becoming smarter and faster
• Interactions are on a stage for the world to see and respond to
• Digital interactions can now be analyzed for a deeper understanding of the impact of communications between neighbors, brands, enemies, peers, competitors, etc.

According to Peter Diamandis

Right now, a Maasai warrior(a semi-nomadic people from Kenya) on mobile phone has better mobile communications than President Reagan did 25 years ago; And if that same Maasai were on Google, he would have access to more information than President Clinton did just 15 years ago.

.

2. The Digitization of Everything

More and more of our world is being absorbed into a digital format. What we do, where we go, what we learn, what we buy is moving rapidly into the digital realm. From the annihilation of music and print media industries to implanted chips in the military, to smart devices and cars, to “humans on a chip”, and tracking entire ecological systems at a micro or nano level.

What is the impact? Chris Anderson once said, “Every industry that becomes digital eventually becomes FREE”.

If every industry is indeed moving into the digital realm, is every industry indeed moving towards free? Perhaps the better question is “Are your products and services being rapidly commoditized?”

• The computing power of an iPad2 would have cost over $100,000,000 just 30 years ago. Now it costs just a few hundred dollars.
• The cost of sequencing a human genome cost over $100,000,000 just a little over a decade ago. Today that cost is under $10,000.
• I can store all of the worlds music for under $600.

This week I just read how a company is India is working towards distributing a fully functioning tablet computer for $20.

Where Customer Experience Fits

The imaginary world discussed at the beginning of the presentation is the real world of the near future.

In an era where anyone has access to nearly everyone or anything from anywhere, how will you compete? How will you differentiate? How will you create value?

If this line of thinking isn’t on your radar, it should be. It’s critical.

In an era of rapid commoditization, the customer experience is one of the most difficult things to duplicate. Your customers really only want two things from you:

1. Help them accomplish what they’re trying to do, and/or
2. Help them to “feel good”

(I guess I could add a few more through a slightly different lens, like the “Six Things Customers Want”)

These both require an increasingly intimate knowledge of who your customers are, and what they’re trying to accomplish. While traditional products and services are indeed being commoditized, the ability to harness, capture, and utilize unprecedented access to information gives those who are able to identify customer behaviors, needs, preferences, jobs, decision drivers, creatively problem solve, and harness capabilities to create products and services that are simple to understand and consume will win.

Some of the emerging frontiers and opportunities are in the slide below.

In Summary

The two major trends highlighted above are converging to put pressure on nearly every institution, especially for-profit corporations. Customer experience is continuing to move towards the forefront of differentiation capabilities in an increasingly connected, fast paced, digital world. Ironically, the distribution of channels and interactions is simultaneously adding significant complexity to defining and understanding customer journeys, and the impact of a myriad of interactions across that journey.

I’ve included a copy of the entire deck below. I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

The post Rapid digital innovation fueling vast complexity and opportunity for customer experience executives appeared first on Value Creator.

From a competitive standpoint, this phrase conjures up images of one champion left among the many fallen. One champion bold enough, strong enough, and resilient enough to outlast everyone else.

The immortal words of Hall of Fame Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi come to mind:

“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour — his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear — is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”

However, in a networked age, is this mindset still relevant, or does the phrase “And then there was one” take on a completely different connotation?

Humans across the globe continue to assemble into one giant interconnected network, a network of one.

It’s imperative to recognize that this didn’t just happen with the creation and growth of facebook, or my space, friendster, or geocities before that. Civilization has been paving the way towards greater connectedness since the beginning of the 15th century, but more specifically over the last century. The printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television paved the way for the internet. And the internet has paved the way for faster and richer connection and communication, which continues to outpace our comprehension of how to truly leverage these new technologies at mass scale.

In addition, this rapidly assembling network isn’t just humans. It includes machines as well. Assuming the current trajectory, there will ultimately be one interconnected global network of people, machinery, robots, appliances, cameras, smartphones, and devices and meters we haven’t quite conceived yet.

In my session at the CRM Evolution conference last week (and in a few previous presentations), I asked the question that I believe should be at the forefront of every executive’s mind:

“In a world where access to almost anyone and anything is available from almost anywhere…
and in many cases will be automatically recommended…
How will you compete and win?”

Reflecting on this question, I realize that I may actually also be captive to an old way of thinking. In a networked economy, the concept of competing and winning may simply be outdated. Or perhaps, winning is not outdated, just the methods, measurements, and outcomes associated with it may be.

In a networked economy, there are very few clear winners and losers, but nodes that contribute and prosper from participation in constantly evolving flows of value creation. The mindset that infers that business is a zero sum game may be on its way to extinction (especially when there is a seemingly limitless supply of global monetary currency).

Perhaps the better question to ask is:

“In a world where access to almost anyone and anything is available from almost anywhere…
and in many cases will be automatically recommended…
How will you continually create value in constantly evolving complex network?”

How are you and your organization responding to this rapidly descending inevitability?

The post And then there was One appeared first on Value Creator.

Did you know that in the past 3 years, we’ve seen:

• Encyclopedia Brittanica go out of print after 244 years
• Newspaper Ad Revenue surpassed by Internet Advertising after 305 years
• Number of Landlines surpassed by Mobile Phones after 125 years

We’ve seen the meteoric rise and fall of companies like Nokia, RIM, MySpace, and Groupon.

The average tenure of an S&P 500 company has dropped from 75 years in 1937 to just 15 years in 2012. At the current rate 75-80% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027.

Technology advancement continues to shorten feedback loops, speeding up the game and competitive pressure in nearly every industry. If your organization is in technology, you’re probably towards the front. If your company is in industrial materials, you’re likely closer to the end of the long tail. But, the changes we are seeing will effect every industry, every organization, and every individual.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about this tech advancement is that the advance in computing power which is behind this accelerated pace is increasing exponentially. The pace of innovation over the next 10 years will be similar to the pace of innovation over the past 100 years. The data suggests that the next 25-30 years will be equivalent to the innovations that happened over the past 1,000 years — yes, one thousand years worth of innovation will be packed into the next 25-30 years.

The ability to succeed in the coming age will depend on being able to sense and respond in real time. However, most organizations are not built to operate in that type of environment. Leaders are aggressively grasping for answers as many of them are aware that the thriving organizations of the industrial age will soon be surpassed by a new breed of more agile and dynamic organizations.

A recent IBM study highlighted the 3 biggest questions burning in the minds of CEOs today:

• How do you deal with the increasing complexity of the planet?
• How do you run businesses that are “fleet of foot”?

And the top priority was:

• How do you promote creativity? How do you promote it and do it systematically?

According to research performed by John Hagel, 60 to 70% of headcount time in most functions is consumed by handling exceptions… things that get thrown out of automated processes. The very construct of rigid and linear processes is giving way to the reality that organizations are simply one layer in multi-dimensional complex adaptive systems.

When exceptions occur, employees scramble to find answers, to find the right people, analyze and understand the full picture, brainstorm, and then determine what to do. The good news is that we have unprecedented access to tools and cloud services to enable such responses. However, in a typical siloed, command and control, hierarchical environment, performing this exercise is extremely inefficient.

Knowledge workers operating in networked “next generation” enterprises will benefit from dynamic and personalized recommendations, relevant and contextual information, referrals to individuals, and richer communication possibilities, powered by predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, more data than the world has ever known, and broadband access that far exceeds yesterday’s wildest dreams.

The work to get there and benefits reaped are well underway. Data from 3 recent McKinsey studies confirm these benefits. Between 2009 and 2011, the top 3 areas where gains were consistently realized by companies leveraging Web 2.0 technologies were:

• Increasing speed to access knowledge
• Reducing communication costs
• Increasing speed to access internal experts

Here’s where the role of the CIO becomes so important for the next generation enterprise.

Information technologies are becoming increasingly important to organizational success (or even survival). While users and business units have recently taken things into their own hands by bringing their own devices, services, and cloud systems into their work efforts, circumventing the constraints and red tape of the firm’s IT department, they now run the risk of re-creating silos that firms have spend the last 20 years trying to break down. This (r)evolution provides a great opportunity for the CIO to help enable the unified holistic transition of the entire organization.

Organizations and CIOs who can create alignment between dynamic marketplace demands, organizational culture, and emerging collaboration technology have a tremendous opportunity to differentiate and sieze first mover advantage in a confused and fragmented marketplace.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

The post Seizing Opportunity in a Hyper-Dynamic Environment appeared first on Value Creator.

Well, it’s only taken us 3,000 years, but we’re finally getting back together. You may be familiar with this story from Genesis.

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel —because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Three thousand years later, we may still be scattered. but we are increasingly finding new ways to connect and collaborate. We’ve been slowly and steadily re-connecting and rebuilding, and extending the scope and complexity of our circles along the way; at an accelerating pace over the past century. The internet, social networks, and cloud computing continue to provide innovative pathways to new forms of collaboration. One recent example is Highlight which helps strangers nearby connect to each other. Qualcomm’s Gimbal platform is providing us a glimpse of the next generation web and increased use of contextual awareness. The next generation of applications leveraging rapid connection and collaboration capabilities will continue to stretch boundaries, disrupt incumbents, and create new opportunities for arbitrage.

From an enterprise perspective, new threats and opportunities also exist. In fact, every institution is being affected, and I can’t think of anyone or anything that won’t be impacted by the rewiring of institutions currently upon us.

The McKinsey Global Institute just released a great study titled “The Social Economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies”

The 184 page report makes the argument that social technologies could potentially contribute $900 billion to $1.3 billion in annual value across four commercial sectors: consumer packaged goods, retail financial services, advanced manufacturing, and professional services.

Perhaps what’s most interesting is that it goes on to make the argument that the majority of the potential for value gain comes from improvements in internal collaboration. The study highlights ten ways social technologies can add value in organizational functions within and across enterprises.

No matter who you are, or what you do, the enterprise levers highlighted as 9 and 10 are relevant to every part of every organization. Finding the right people, the right information, and leveraging those assets to help accomplish stated goals in a quicker more efficient manner is the crux behind this entire movement.

In three surveys conducted annually between 2009 and 2011, the TOP 3 areas where measurable gains were consistently realized by companies leveraging Web 2.0 technologies internally were:

However, where most companies appear to be stuck is in the area of cultural transformation, which is much easier said than done. Morphing from centralized, command and control hierarchies into decentralized, adaptive, and agile organizations takes time, and there is not yet a well defined methodology for doing so, though thousands of experiments are currently under way.

While business leaders wrestle with evolving their industrial age organizations to compete in a more connected and fast changing world, CIOs must also adapt their approach to empowering the next generation enterprise. The purposes, tools, deployment strategies, and economic evaluation required to empower the next generation of institutions are different, highlighted by the chart below.

The McKinsey study contains a wealth of data and insights and creates a compelling case for the tangible business value of social technologies, most of which has yet to be achieved my most organizations.

As your organization transitions from experimental mode to making the internal business case for tangible business value, what have the most compelling findings or hardest challenges been? Where are you stuck and how can I help?

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

The post Creating Measurable Business Value through Social Collaboration appeared first on Value Creator.