Leadership, Business Development, Strategy, and Management : Summarized

Video – Post-Crisis Reform and Fair Value Accounting

Video: How SuperCorps Are Changing the Workforce and the World

Social Media Trends for 2010

David Armano of Harvard University posed this week on the 6 social media trends for 2010.  Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Meanwhile, Facebook continued to outpace MySpace. Social media will become even more popular and continue to integrate in with our lives.

In no particular order, David lists out the upcoming trends:

1. Social media begins to look less social
. With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more “exclusive.” Not everyone can fit on someone’s newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it’s likely that user behavior such as “hiding” the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it’s not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

2. Corporations look to scale There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy’s Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates. This is a sign of things to come over the next year as more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology.
3. Social business becomes serious play Relatively new networks such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile. However, it also has a game-like quality to it which brings out the competitor in the user. Participants are incentivized and rewarded through higher participation levels. And push technology is there to remind you that your friends are one step away from stealing your coveted “mayorship.” As businesses look to incentivize activity within their internal or external networks, they may include carrots that encourage a bit of friendly competition.
4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced) If the company you work for doesn’t already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what’s considered competition, it’s likely that you’ll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.
5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it’s likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into “social media breaks” as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn’t looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice.
6. Sharing no longer means e-mail The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it’s likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.

Building Confidence as a Leader

Marshall Goldsmith, renowned author and Harvard Professor, posted against the question of “What can I do to build my confidence in my capabilities as a leader?”

This is pretty straightforward stuff but a refresher on what keeps us at the top should never be scoffed at. In summary, remember to believe in yourself, don’t worry about being perfect, put up a brave front, and do the best you possibly can. Anything short of that will cause you to slip.

Marshall shared a few more pointers I thought you might enjoy:

1. Don’t worry about being perfect. There are never right or wrong answers to complex business decisions. The best that you can do as a leader is to gather all of the information that you can (in a timely manner), do a cost-benefit analysis of potential options, use your best judgment — and then go for it.
2. Learn to live with failure. Great salespeople are the ones who get rejected the most often. They just ask for the order more than the other salespeople. You are going to make mistakes. You are human. Learn from these mistakes and move on.
3. After you make the final decision — commit! Don’t continually second-guess yourself. Great leaders communicate with a sense of belief in what they are doing and with positive expectations toward the achievement of their vision.
4. Show courage on the outside — even if you don’t always feel it on the inside. Everyone is afraid sometimes. If you are a leader, your direct reports will read your every expression. If you show a lack of courage, you will begin to damage your direct reports’ self-confidence.
5. Find happiness and contentment in your work. Life is short. My extensive research indicates that we are all going to die anyway. Do your best. Follow your heart. When you win, celebrate. When you lose, just start over the next day.

When the Finder needs to find a CEO

Columbia Business School posted an article on Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, about his experience as an entrepreneur. The decision to hand over the reins was a tough one because, you guessed it, he had to relegate control. But it worked. “You need to know when to get out of the way and stop talking.” Craig said.

For every company, reaching that inflection point where things start to fall through the cracks is a true test of long-term viability. The exact metrics are different for every company, but the ability to anticipate these issues, add professional management to negotiate them and put ego aside in the pursuit of supporting the right outcome determines success or failure.

Not surprisingly, first-time founders fail more often than serial entrepreneurs at navigating these growth pains. Serial entrepreneurs more often have the self awareness to step aside or recruit executives with complementary strengths to support scale. Also, serial entrepreneurs more often go out and attract advisers who help hold them accountable to making these changes.

Social Learning and Dealing with the Recession at a Lower Cost

An updated document from Accenture has been made available. It addresses what it calls the ‘Capability Recession’. Due to cut backs made, many companies are less able to service their customers, produce sales, or innovate like they used to.

One outstanding question that applies is how to generate better performance from their workforce.

The answer is not to jettison a company’s existing approach to enterprise learning—even one that relies heavily on more traditional and formal classroom learning experiences. The answer is an additive one: Optimize the blend of formal training, informal learning and knowledge-sharing activities that a company makes available to its people.

All employees have the opportunity within the learning environment to establish a presence or social profile that reflects their expertise and interests. They can then create and share their knowledge and experience, even search for peer insights, all organized by user-generated tags and topics. People and their content are linked to one another through team sites, instant messaging, blogs and discussion threads. Material is also rated by peers during the sharing process according to quality and applicability.
Accenture recommends proceeding on the path to social learning in the following way:

• Strategize. Work with senior leadership to conduct a business-case analysis of where opportunities exist to improve employee productivity and performance through an improved learning environment. State those opportunities explicitly in terms of wasted spending as well as opportunities to generate better business results.
• Evaluate. An important step for Dare2Share was an “innovation day” when we brought together many of our best thinkers and practitioners from BT and Accenture to review and debate the merits of various Web 2.0 technologies. The point of review and debate at this stage is not about just the technologies but the business and learning needs those technologies address.
• Prove. Start with a workable proof-of-concept followed by a pilot test involving a representative sample of your employee population. Test the technology, functions, usability, content, learning networks and rewards programs.
• Promote. Use the success of your pilot to generate enthusiasm around the rest of the organization. Use good marketing methods and senior executive sponsorship to increase awareness and engagement.
• Measure. Monitor usage, gather feedback and measure results, feeding all that back into subsequent releases of the social learning solution.

Web Stats You Should Know

Anthony Tjan, CEO of Cue Ball, and professor at Harvard posted last week on web stats everyone should know. Even if you are not directly involved with the web (who isn’t?), these if nothing else will help add some street cred for when the conversation turns techie.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #1: 40,000-fold increase in the number of websites in 15 short years. If the number of approximately 5000 websites in 1994 is correct and that we are now part of some 200 million plus websites today, then we’ve experienced a stunning 40,000-fold increase in number of websites.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #2: It feels like it was only yesterday that Evan Williams coined the term, “blogger” as founder of Blogger.com before taking the head post at Twitter. Today, the blogosphere is doubling between once and twice a year and there are over one million blog posts daily.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #3: Speaking of Evan and Twitter, there have now been more than five billion tweets.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat #4: Not to leave out some of the other obvious big web names of our day, here are two stunning stats on Google and Facebook. Google still owns the search market. Sources estimate that the search goliath receives about two billion queries per day. That said, I think I’m more impressed by InsideFacebook.com’s estimates that the social network is adding 700,000 new users per day.

Mind-Blowing Web Stat # 5: What is amazing is that whether you look at the global top ten or US top ten websites, about half of the sites are five- to six-year-old companies (e.g. YouTube, Blogger, and Facebook). The implication is that we’ll continue to see a pretty high-rate of churn amongst the top ten.

Cutting Costs the Smart Way

McKinsey has published an article on a better way to cut costs. This is an area I’ve been helping companies and non-profit organizations with for well over 2 years now and it continues to surprise me how many organizations are willing to use the knife without much thought behind where to cut and why. This article picks up on that theme.

According to a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey, 79 percent of all companies have cut costs in response to the global economic crisis—but only 53 percent of executives think that doing so has helped their companies weather it. Yet organizations continue to cut. Cost reductions often go wrong, we believe, and our experience suggests that they can be done in a better way.

In an example of how badly things can go wrong, McKinsey offers a story.

An international energy company that needed to save money fast started by simply defining the amount of savings it needed and then required each department to cut costs by a similar amount, primarily through head count reductions, which varied from 17 to 22 percent. The reality, however, was that the company needed to invest more in certain technological areas that were changing quickly, as well as in operations, where performance was far below industry benchmarks. What’s more, the HR and IT departments substantially duplicated certain activities because different layers in the organization were doing similar things. Much deeper cuts could therefore be made in these functions, with little strategic risk. But the company cut costs across the board, and just six months later, technology and operations were lobbying hard to bring in new staff to take on an “uncontrollable workload,” while substantial duplication remained in HR and IT.

How to combine your sales force in a merger.

McKinsey has published a paper on how to survive a merger and combine sales forces. By involving employees and customers in the integration process, it is possible to retain critical staff, generate momentum with key accounts, and increase customer satisfaction. If you are in the process of approaching an integration, can you risk loosing these key elements by doing a botched job?

We have identified four steps essential to facilitating the successful integration of sales operations. At the top of the list: understanding the importance of sharing information about the integration process with customers and the sales force. Many companies take the opposite approach and are surprised when postmerger revenue fails to meet expectations. In addition, the combined sales team must quickly win prominent accounts to build momentum and generate internal confidence in the merger. The executives running the integration effort must also recognize that, as important as sales reps are, essential support people must be identified and retained. Finally, senior managers should review the merged portfolio of customers and make tough calls about those that are worth new investments and those that might be shed or given less attention.

Quick & Dirty to Getting Things Done

BNet released their Quick & Dirty Guide to Getting Things Done this week for Project Managers. It seems these days no matter what line of work you are in, even executives, there are elements of Project Management that you perform, thus the reason for posting this here.

“By official definition, a project manager is a professional who plans, organizes, directs, and controls company resources to complete specific objectives.”

The article is much more in-depth and this is just a summary but you get the idea.

Step 1: Be a Control Freak From the Beginning
Step 2: Don’t Abuse E-Mail
Step 3: Put Our Fires Quickly
Step 4: Always Do a Postmortem