This terrific graphic from Infographic World has been making the rounds quite a bit lately, but I thought it was such a great visualization of how content (presumably good content) can so easily go viral, I wanted to pass it along.
This terrific graphic from Infographic World has been making the rounds quite a bit lately, but I thought it was such a great visualization of how content (presumably good content) can so easily go viral, I wanted to pass it along.
After myriad proclamations over the past decade that the notion/concept of sustainability as a corporate imperative had crossed the Rubicon and entered the mainstream, it appears that maybe a destination of sorts has been reached. A recent panel of senior executives from consulting, banking and the chemical industries sat down to debate and discuss this critical shift during the recent Wharton Social Impact conference and generally agreed that the movement has finally become a central part of the mission statement at many enterprises.
If building a sustainable enterprise was a fashionable trend five years ago, today it is a business imperative. Forward-looking corporations have figured out that a focus on environmental, social and governmental (ESG) factors is not just a bid to burnish their image, but rather it is a necessity in today's marketplace. And if done well, it is a true competitive advantage.
An important, and critical, divide seems to be opening between those companies that get it and those that don’t. Despite protestations from a sub-stratum of firms that view an embrace of the green/sustainable strategy as a cost rather than an opportunity, more and more high-profile enterprises are engaging at varying levels of investment.
In fact, for savvy companies, a strategy built around sustainability can be a critical advantage, Boston Consulting Group senior partner Martin Reeves pointed out. Even when government action puts more burdens on business, Reeves said there can be an upside. When you change the rules of the game, you "are putting a floor on certain behaviors [and] raising barriers to entry." Case in point: the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration, which Reeves contended "essentially took a snake oil industry and turned it into an industry with very strict scientific standards."
When anticipating the learning curve for macro level changes in behavior, it is generally believed that it requires a generation for new behaviors to achieve mainstream acceptance and incorporation into strategic and tactical decision making going forward. As the tail end of the Boomers and Generation X ascend to leadership positions in business, it would appear that sustainability will be a fundamental consideration for the most savvy and market attuned enterprises moving forward.
Among the panel's key messages was that the need to address ESG issues will only intensify over time, in part because the next generation of business leaders is demanding it. One of the audiences most keenly interested in the report Citigroup puts out annually on its sustainability record, Eubank noted, is the company's recruiting operation. "Students these days are much more environmentally aware, and they want to know what a company's sustainability policies are," Eubank said. "Bankers want to know that they are working for a company that is being responsible."
As I am a visual thinker, I do love a good graphic. Jeremy Gutsche, Chief Trend Hunter at TrendHunter.com, included some nice ones in his book, Exploiting Chaos last year. At the core of his thesis, that in times of chaos, companies must learn not to create structure and stability, but rather, to adapt quickly, is this evocation of a process that is aligned with much of my thinking. While I have nits to pick with some of his conclusions in the book, I appreciate the codification of the thinking around chaos and the opportunities that learning to manage chaos to the enterprises' (and individual's) benefit serves in creating elements of competitive advantage.
The key elements of what Gutsche refers to as the Exploiting Chaos Framework are outlined below:
Culture of Revolution
Culture is more important than strategy. Culture underlies your organization’s ability to adapt, and times of dramatic change magnify this importance. Most likely, your organization perceives the need to adapt, but uncertainty and resistance are paralyzing innovation. By creating an organizational culture of revolution, you can spark a new paradigm for creative change.
Trend Hunting
Innovation and strategic advantage hinge on your ability to anticipate trends and identify the next big thing. By using the cutting-edge framework in this book, you can filter through chaos and identify clusters of opportunity to focus your innovation.
Adaptive Innovation
Engineers, designers, and scientists have invested billions of dollars to perfect human creativity. By applying the best of their proven practices to your own field, you can think big while acting small. You can rapidly identify and evaluate new opportunities.
Infectious Messaging
The Internet has created a world cluttered with chaos, but it has also created the world’s first viral platform for ideas. Well-packaged stories travel faster than ever before. Unfortunately, most marketers are stuck in a world dominated by traditional advertising and cliché. By cultivating infection, your ideas will resonate, helping you to leapfrog ahead of the competition.
An expanded view of the Framework adds some color to the canvas.
The first chapter of the eBook is available for free download here and the book can also be purchased at the same location.
Due to consulting work and other demands on my time, it took much longer than expected to complete a corporate overview presentation for my business innovation advisory project, Campfire Strategies. But, here it is, debuting as the first generation.
Stuff that I find interesting. Maybe you will too.
The most recent issue of Strategy + Business features has a nice discussion of Booz & Company’s framework and methodology for evaluating growth strategies in this era of continuing economic uncertainty, tight capital markets and expanding competitive landscapes.
As rapid commoditization of products and services takes its toll on what were, once upon a time, competitively advantage business models, the pursuit, assessment and actualization of unconventional and undiscovered opportunities and ideas becomes increasingly vital. The article provides an overview of an evaluation methodology built upon five discrete lenses for assessing the viability of new market opportunities, as represented in the graphic below.
According to authors Greg Lavery and Chris Manning, “The Growth Lens methodology has five lenses that can be used, separately and together, to expand a company’s perspective on growth. The goal is to challenge assumptions about the size, shape, and definition of markets through a facilitated, creative, and rigorous process of business idea generation.”
Brainstorming, innovation, creativity and ideation are important activities at the front end of the process for developing new revenue engines and the corresponding business models, but informing the process with some rigor for evaluation and rationalization early can prevent time-consuming and costly false starts.
Innovation is the heart and soul of what I try to do for clients at Campfire Strategies. As the velocity of change attacks enterprises at both the macro and micro levels, embracing the dynamics by innovating thru products, services and customer care is paramount. The graphics below, courtesy of Forrester, BCG and BusinessWeek, confirm that in the midst of economic uncertainty, companies that expect to lead in a market place that doesn't currently provide a clear path forward are making innovation a top strategic priority.
The advent of the smart grid has been announced numerous times during the past 15 years. It has been simultaneously encouraging and discouraging to witness the progress towards an environment of intelligent energy management during that period. Few great advances arrive without serious headwinds. Particularly in such a “smokestack”-affiliated industry as electric utilities, change can be glacial.
The “science” surrounding innovative technologies has always held far less interest for me than the practical application of those technologies. It is not what it is, but what it can do, that intrigues me and feeds into my constantly evolving view of the world and the industries and markets that comprise the global marketplace.
A dozen years ago, I participated in sketching out an early architecture for the concept of the Smart Home as part of the broader smart energy initiative and have a continuing interest in the advancement of the technologies that comprise what is now referred to as the Smart Grid. A simple graphic of the smart grid environment is represented below.
Managing energy demand and optimizing energy usage are fundamental to any strategy/philosophy/approach to arriving at a sustainable and clean energy economy. To that end, electric utilities are being encouraged to utilize smart-grid technology -- network-connected devices to help intelligently monitor and manage power usage -- whether on their dime or through funding from the U.S. government's 2009 stimulus package. Smart energy systems are designed to save energy via intelligent management of energy usage in homes and businesses. Beyond that activity at the point of consumption, the smart grid seeks to promote improved optimization at every point between generation and consumption to actively manage the grid.
As this proposed build out of the smart grid is, for the most part, a digital network solution, the question/concern of hacking the system necessarily arises. However real and mature the threat, it does create new challenges for utilities to meet to ensure safety, reliability, etc. for their residential and commercial customer bases. The threat may be most acute at those interfaces where smart grid platforms are required to integrate with older control equipment such as SCADA ( Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems as well as the first generation of smart meters.
As more and more processes in every industry become digitally-driven, we will face these same kinds of challenges. In many cases, such as with the smart grid effort, they will be met and overcome because their is simply no alternative.
Stumbled across this interesting graphic from Market Matters in the United Kingdom. They offer strategy workshops as part of their service portfolio to assist companies in improving their capital market valuations by successfully identifying, crafting and telling their story to their key constituencies. In their words,
"A compelling strategy that creates a vivid picture of where you will stand in five and ten year's time is vital. With so much attention focusing on an uncertain short term, developing a corporate strategy capable of creating long-term shareholder value is increasingly important. A clear, convincing and credible strategy appeals to investors and inspires employees."
This represents yet one more data point in the rapidly expanding universe supporting the necessity for organizations, of whatever persuasion - profit/non-profit, etc -- to craft their story and tell it to every one of their key stakeholders.
When it rains, it pours, or so it seems. On the heels of a recent Forrester report on the future of IT services which I wrote about here, management consultant A.T. Kearney weighs in with their own, very similar view on that future. This recent op-ed in Businessweek by Arjun Sethi and Olivier Aries sees most of the same external drivers highlighted in the Forrester report but offers a different and altogether more interesting futurescape for IT services.
“ In the next five years outsourcing as we know it will disappear. The legion of Indian service providers will be sidelined or absorbed. U.S. and European companies that pioneered this corner of the high tech industry will suffer similar fates if they don't wake up. Who will emerge as the new leaders? Google and Amazon.com , brands that we associate with search and retail, will become better known for outsourcing."
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have been harping on the threat that Amazon and Google, in particular, present to the old guard of IT service providers as I have written about it here, here and here. SaaS/cloud technologies, under any name, have been a game changing disruptive force for the past 10 years. When IBM acquired Corio five years ago, that should have, de facto, been some kind of canary in the coal mine.
In their commentary Sethi and Aries also conjure up a vision of what the new outsourcing model will look like.
“In the new model, outsourcers provide standard, off-the-shelf software on a "pay-per-drink" basis. For that, they will leverage so-called cloud technology, which lets users tap into computing power available via the Internet, rather than on a desktop or computer server housed locally. The appeal is scale, flexibility, and efficiency: Thousands of server computers can attack a task more quickly—and cheaply—or handle a patchwork quilt of different technologies that companies use to run their businesses. This approach will let businesses outsource entire tasks such as the tracking of inventory, paying only for the information accessed or used.”
The commentary also mentions who might be the losers in this new model (mid-tier Indian outsourcers), possible winners (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce), and a several major players that are not moving fast enough (Accenture, Xerox, Dell, HP).
I am guessing that this commentary and the Forrester report will be far from the last discussions regarding the changing IT services landscape. I would also imagine that we will see more and more discussion of the death of the internal IT department beyond the many books and reports already written. Fasten your seatbelts.