What is the value of a social business? How do you become one? Can you create one? Or is it more about motivation, enabling the social forces already at work?
In his piece in Forbes, senior director of global marketing for SAP Michael Brenner examines how individuals and companies are moving beyond why they need to become a social business and today shifting the focus to how to become a social business (and maximizing the resulting value and innovation).
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What do you see as the main barriers to social business in your organization? Share your thoughts in the Comments.
About the author:
Michael Brenner is a senior director of Global Marketing for SAP and is the author of the B2BMarketingInsider.com blog, Editor for SAP’s Business Innovation site – http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/. He’s also is a co-founder of Business2Community.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BrennerMichael.
In this obituary in The New York Times, reporter Leslie Kaufman details the life of Chester Hansen, who passed away recently at 95. A former editor of the IBM magazine, Mr. Hansen was a highly acclaimed diarist, documenting his experiences throughout World War II. Following his service, Mr. Hansen’s work at IBM also included writing speeches for Thomas Watson Jr.
Read the full story here.
Capt. Chester Hansen, left, pictured with Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley in Sicily. (from the Omar N. Bradley papers)
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Share your thoughts in the Comments section.
by Ron Ashkenas, Forbes
Last summer I had an early morning conference call with another consultant and one of his clients. As we were wrapping up, I asked the other two people from where they were calling. One sheepishly said that she was vacationing on the Jersey Shore with her family and had sneaked out early to make the call. The second person admitted that he was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard and had done the same thing. I then confessed that I was calling from western Massachusetts where my family had rented a lake cottage. After a moment of silence, one of us said, “Boy! Are we stupid!” We all laughed as we ended the call — and then presumably went back to our vacations (and our e-mails).
What’s interesting about this story is not that we were doing work on our vacations, but rather that none of us questioned the timing of the work call in the first place. We all presumably knew that the call would occur during our holidays, yet no one suggested an alternative date.
The reality for many of us these days is that our professional lives bleed into our personal lives. The boundaries are increasingly permeable and movable. We check our emails in the evenings and weekends. We delay or miss family events because we can’t leave the office. And when we do, we take our communications devices with us so that we can stay connected to work.
In previous posts I’ve encouraged professionals to manage the work-life balance more proactively by thinking through their priorities and consciously addressing how work intrudes on their personal lives. But in light of how many of us blend work time with personal time, perhaps this advice is overly simplistic — unrealistic even. Maybe we need to accept the fact that the sharp demarcation between work and home is a thing of the past, and that the new normal is a life that integrates home and work more seamlessly.
Focusing on work-life “integration” instead of work-life “balance” has at least a couple of implications: First (and the one that I like the most) is that we can stop feeling guilty about scheduling calls during our vacations or checking our emails at night; and by the same token not feel guilty about talking with our spouses, friends, and family members during work time.
The second implication is that we no longer split up our time so rigidly between “work hours” and “non-work hours.” Instead, let’s be flexible about when and how we accomplish both our work goals and our personal goals. Obviously some of this has to be negotiated with others, both at work (who is on call for customers?) and home (who gets to use the car?). But the point is to make this a natural part of how we organize our lives instead of a special perk or exceptional situation.
Most organizations of course are not set up to accommodate employees who want to blend their personal and work lives, and in fact actively discourage it through work rules, inflexible hours, and other practices. A number of pilot projects, however, have shown that when teams of interdependent workers (e.g., customer services representatives) are empowered to create their own plans for how and when to get their work done, productivity improves considerably.
So maybe it’s time to rethink not only the way we organize work — but also the way we organize our lives. Instead of pushing back or feeling resentful when work issues interrupt us, let’s accept that interruptions are a part of life; whether they are caused by children, friends, family dramas, broken pipes — or phone calls during our vacations.
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Greater IBMers: What are your thoughts about the increasing integration of home and work?
Ron Ashkenas is a senior partner of Schaffer Consulting, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm and the author of the book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done.
IBMers are collaborative by nature, with a long history of using technology to bring people and information together to drive business results. Since the days of the mainframe and VM, to the early days of the Web, intranets, and jams, IBM has historically been one of the world’s most innovative companies.
Today, with vast amounts of data being generated by social behavior, how can IBM best use that information to derive more insight, both for the company and clients? How can it drive better client experiences? How can IBMers help to accelerate the cultural shifts necessary to reap benefits, while maintaining commitment to the integrity and security of IBM and client data?
A HackDay is an event where people step outside of the normal scope of work and apply their expertise toward driving new innovations. Throughout the 2012 Social Business HackDay, IBM wants to focus on work processes, collaborative models, and anything else you feel could improve and accelerate IBM’s transformation to a social business. HackDay provides a great opportunity for you to help shape how IBM continues to integrate social business capabilities into how we work and to drive innovation that matters for the company and the world.
Every IBMer should feel they have an opportunity to participate in HackDay. From working on prototypes of your own ideas to submitting ideas for others to work on, every IBMer has something to contribute — whether or not you consider yourself to be “technical”.
Simply put, a hack is anything that makes things better. You create and use hacks without even knowing it. See some examples.
In today’s business world, where much of our communications are conducted via email and instant messages and texts, it’s still important to remember what to do – and more importantly, what NOT to do – when you’re on the phone. You’re the voice of your company, after all!
by Anita Bruzzese, 45 Things/USA Today
There are few things more annoying than being on the phone with someone who is a) eating; b) doing something else; c) mumbling or speaking too softly; d) talking to someone in the background; or e) behaving in a rude or dismissive way.
Author Anita Bruzzese
With the reliance on e-mail, more people seem to have forgotten the art of speaking on the phone. But how you interact with someone on the the phone can be critical to your success. Even one phone misstep can cost you an important client, tick off a boss or even mar the reputation of your entire company. Let’s look at Telephone Manners 101.
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What’s the worst phone habit you’ve encountered at work? Tell us below.
Wildly successful businessman started writing for LinkedIn.com this year. In his debut post, he shares his insights on how to start a successful business. An entrepreneur and thought leader you can always learn from – get the five top tips he’s “picked up over the years” right here.
What would you add to this list?
Most cold-calling scripts include dated lines that can scare off potential customers. There are better ways to make the same points.
by Jeffrey James, Inc.com
Over the years, I’ve read dozens of cold-calling scripts. Most of them contain old, tired phrases that annoy customers and immediately put them on the defensive.
Here are six of the worst offenders–along with my suggestions for turning the cold call into a real, live conversation.
1. “How are ya doin’ today?”
You don’t know the customer personally at this point, so the customer realizes that you’re only pretending to care how they are. Furthermore, you’ve only got about 10 or 15 seconds to justify why you’re calling.
Better to get the point quickly: “I’m calling because…”
2. “Free estimate with no obligation”
Anybody with half a brain knows that a “free estimate” means getting set up for a sales pitch.
Rather than using the tired language of the hard sell, talk the way that people talk in the real world of business: “I’d be happy to run some numbers for you.”
3. “Unconditional guarantee”
Most people know that guarantees are meaningless and that warranties, which actually do have legal standing, are always conditional.
Rather than making empty promises, provide specific information about how you make certain your customers are delighted: “Here’s how we support our customers…”
4. “If I could show you a way…”
This line may have seemed like a brilliant sales pitch back in the Mad Men era, but today it sounds cheesy and manipulative.
If you want to find out the conditions under which a customer is going to buy, it’s better just to ask: “What’s most important to you?”
5. “Nobody can sell this cheaper”
Assuming the customer is sitting in front of a computer screen, it will take about 10 seconds to find a lower price somewhere on the Web.
Your real challenge is to establish yourself as a problem solver rather than the lowest-priced source. To do that, try something like: “We make things easy for you by…”
6. “I’ll be honest with you”
This statement flags a piece of information as being important–but it also plants the seed that you’ve been dishonest up until this point.
Instead, make that piece of information seem important by giving it more emotional weight, like: “Here’s what I really think…”
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What are YOUR tricks for getting someone on the phone to listen to you? Got any helpful hints to share?
Quality is not enough.
by Cass R. Sunstein, Bloomberg View
“Searching for Sugar Man” is a stunning documentary about an unsuccessful Detroit singer- songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez, who released two long- forgotten albums in the early 1970s. Almost no one bought his albums, and his label dropped him. Rodriguez stopped making records and worked as a demolition man.
What Rodriguez didn’t know, while working in demolition, was that he had become a spectacular success in South Africa — a giant, a legend, comparable to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Describing him as “the soundtrack to our lives,” South Africans bought hundreds of thousands of copies of his albums, starting in the 1970’s. “Searching for Sugar Man” is about the contrast between the failed career of Detroit’s obscure demolition man and the renown of South Africa’s mysterious rock icon.
The film is easily taken as a real-world fairy tale, barely believable, a story so extraordinary that it gives new meaning to “you couldn’t make it up.” But it is a bit less extraordinary than it seems, and it offers a profound lesson not only for music and culture markets, but for business and politics, as well.
We like to think that intrinsic quality produces success, and that in free markets, quality will ultimately prevail. To be sure, quality is usually necessary, but it’s not enough.
Social dynamics — who is conveying enthusiasm to whom, and how loudly, and where, and exactly when — can separate the rock icon from the demolition man, and mark the line between stunning success and crashing failure. An understanding of those dynamics tells us a lot about the role of serendipity in cultural markets, business, politics and other domains — and about why success and failure can be impossible to predict.
Consider some evidence. A few years ago, social scientists Matthew Salganik, Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds created a large- scale version of the tale of Rodriguez, in the form of an artificial music market on a website. More than 14,000 visitors to the site were given a list of 48 unknown songs from unknown bands. The experimenters randomly sorted half of the visitors into an “independent judgment” group, in which they were invited to listen to brief excerpts, to rate songs and to decide whether to download them. The other half were sorted into a “social influence” group, which was exactly the same except in just one respect: They could see how many times each song had been downloaded by other participants.
People in the social influence group were also randomly assigned to one of eight subgroups, in which they could see only the number of downloads in their own subgroup. You might expect that in the end, quality would always prevail — that the popularity of the songs, as measured by their download rankings, would be roughly the same in the independent group and in all eight of the social influence groups.
That isn’t what happened. The identical song could be a big hit or a miserable flop, depending on whether a lot of other people were seen to have downloaded it. True, the songs that did most fabulously in the independent group rarely did very badly, and the songs that did most horribly in the independent group rarely did spectacularly well — but otherwise, almost anything could happen.
Social dynamics made Rodriguez in South Africa and broke him in the U.S. Every day, social dynamics make or break books, movies, art and countless other products. Plenty of best- sellers, made possible by bandwagon or cascade effects, could easily have switched places with books that you have never heard of.
Actually the implications are far broader than that. On election day for the 2010 congressional races, certain Facebook users received a social message, a clickable “I voted,” including six pictures of randomly selected Facebook friends who had previously clicked that “I voted” button. Presented with those pictures, people were more likely to vote, and as a result of the experiment, hundreds of thousands of Americans who would not otherwise have voted ended up doing so.
We could easily imagine a parallel experiment with the message, “I didn’t vote,” and it would almost certainly depress voting. In fact, we could easily imagine many influential clickable messages on social media (“I bought a fuel-efficient vehicle,” or “I stopped smoking,” or “I love the Chicago Bears,” or “I bought a Sixto Rodriguez CD”).
Successful entrepreneurs, social movements and politicians benefit from the same dynamics that produce best-selling albums. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were immensely talented and appealing, but countless people voted and worked for them only because they saw that other people were doing so. Other immensely talented and appealing politicians go nowhere, only because they fail to catch an early wave. Science fiction’s “parallel worlds,” exploring how differently history might have turned out, are not as far-fetched as they seem.
True, we can always try to reclaim inevitability by generating after-the-fact explanations of both success and failure. It is tempting to think that Rodriguez did well in South Africa because his songs spoke especially well to that nation’s citizens in the apartheid period. Maybe Rodriguez did poorly in the U.S. because of anti-Hispanic prejudice (as some have speculated).
Maybe, but it’s doubtful. With a few twists of fate and the right social boost at the right time, Rodriguez could have become a big star in the U.S. And without some serendipitous word-of-mouth at the early stages, he wouldn’t have become an icon in South Africa.
History is only run once, so we will never know for sure. What we do know is that social dynamics play a big role in the marketplace and democratic politics — and help to explain why success and failure can be predictably unpredictable.
Here are the most common habits of a dysfunctional team and how to fix them so you can get your group back on track.
by Matthew Swyers, Inc.com
Have you ever been part of a team that just can’t seem to get things done? Don’t despair, it happens more than you think.
How is your team performing?
Read here about the most common habits of a dysfunctional team and how to fix them so you can get your group back on track.
Greater IBMers, has this happened to you? What would you add to this list?
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About the author:
Matthew Swyers is the founder of The Trademark Company, a Web-based law firm specializing in protecting the trademark rights of small to medium-size businesses. The company is ranked No. 138 on the 2011 Inc. 500.
