Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

TechCrunch quotes a warning of sorts by Venture Capitalist Josh Kopelman who basically says 2012 will be more like a correcting 2008, as opposed to a euphoric 2011. Lots of good for and against arguments on the VC investing front by the likes of Dave McClure and others in the comments on TC.

Regardless of who is right, I’m optimistic on the enterprise front.

In 2003, in the midst of the dot bust, I founded a consulting firm that had a singular value proposition. Work with CIOs and LOB leaders at large organizations to help them with a specific strand of operational efficiency. The idea was to capitalize on two realities:

1) Whilst budgets were nose diving, the long list of performance objectives that kept executives up at night showed no signed of dissipating.

2) The blank checks during the preceding dot com boom days meant lots of purchased technology was now sporting cobwebs on CDs in a drawer under a sys admins desk or in data centers.

So we set out to do two things: 1) Bring in the right business and technology strategy muscle that could help sales and marketing, HR leaders and CIOs understand how to do more with less and 2) once operational efficiency and performance objects were set, scour the basements and attics for procured technology that could best facilitate realizing critical revenue and optimizing objectives.

Customers got to do more with less and without antagonizing the CAPEX Gestapo, in exchange for a reasonable services spend. And our lean structure consisting of very available strategists, marketeers, designers and technology architects meant we made out like bandits.

But it was much harder then. Systems didn’t talk to each other easily, data came from a plethora of external and internal systems and immature offshore development was the only way to afford execution skills. You had to prioritize what you could afford and given the cost and difficulty you could only take on a few things. And by the time portals, customer support and channel extranets went live, the requirements changed. But you did the best with what you had. And smart customer executives always find a way to ‘make it happen’ come hell or high water.

If 2012 looks more like 2008 for executives looking for opportunities to get operationally efficient, I’m even more optimistic than I was in 2003. I’ll cover this in my year end post in detail but a couple of quick reasons why:

• The plethora of cloud based systems means you don’t have to make incumbent technology do unnatural things. Chances are very good that there’s a OpEx-enabled technology solution that’s designed to solve precisely the problem you have. Every single system of record has either a cloud based forklift solution available, or a powerful add-on that helps you to keep the ball moving forward at a palatable cost. Even on-premise purveyors such as Oracle and SAP are going to offer cloud based off-shoots.
• APIs for most systems were dismal back then. More systems are built with integration in mind from the get go than ever before. And the likes of SolutionSet or Appirio would be happy to integrate your gnarly on premise File Management system with say Jive or Tibbr or Chatter in the cloud.
• Sources of competitive, customer and market intelligence is much less intermediated, now. Back then, we had to go to brokers (HarteHanks, Factiva, etc) to get lead, customer, competitive insight. Today that data sits at the edge, either available directly via the firehouse from say Yelp or Twitter, crowd sourced from a band of enthusiastic customers by say Spigit, aggregated and process-ized by GetSatisfaction or Assistly, or crunched by the likes of InsideView, The Dachis Group Social Business Index Service or Radian6 (based on the use case).

There’s many many more but you get the idea.  Fundamentally, this adds up to radically more approachable access to both sources of insight and the platforms that enable them.

It’s also important to note that the stakes are higher this time. In the 2003 post-crash world, relatively speaking, we were still serving the same pre-crash customer persona. Sure, we saw the likes of Amazon eat into brick and mortar commerce. But not at the scale that were witnessing at this time. Whether 2012 looks like 2008 or 2011, this market has some unique characteristics that demand that organizations can’t sit it out when it comes to specific trends that will impact who wins and who loses in the next few decades. Broadly speaking:

1. The customer contract has changed, forever. A prospect or customer’s expectations of how we engage and service her is now wildly different thanks to the social web. This requires a change in not just how we work at the edges (sales, marketing, support) but also depends on how nimble we are as organizations to rally employees, partners and suppliers around the prospects cause at hand.

2. I still remember the CEO of one of the largest spirits distributors sitting across the table and literally shaking at the idea this his business could get easily “Amazoned”. If Amazon was a threat to Barnes and Noble in 2000, imagine what the world looks like when I can walk into a BestBuy, scan a bar code on a SKU, have Amazon send me the best price online and proceed towards the exit. That’s a frightfully more radical scenario in any economy, good or bad. Service starts to become much more important if price arbitrage starts to become a thing of the past. Coined by Get Satisfaction, “Customer Service is the new Marketing” starts to become more of a striking reality.

3. Building on the Amazon / Best Buy example, a location aware mobile-first interaction with your business means that the lines are blurred between brick and mortar and digital for the foreseeable future. Fry’s Electronics here in Palo Alto gave me a discount when I showed them a lower price at Amazon on my mobile device. If the market is going to take a step back, you need to understand these dynamics so you can widen your customer footprint as much as you can. That means both find prospects wherever they are hiding but also have access to your best talent at all times to service this more demanding potential buyer.

This might sound like FUD but it’s not. Its an opportunity to understand and then react to a changing market. Same thing you’ve done as executives in down turns and customer shifts in the past. But more practical to do this time and in a way that won’t make your CFO reach for the antacid.

All of this makes me optimistic for the near term future of our industry. On one hand, it’s going to be more important to keep moving the ball foreword in 2012. But the mechanisms to do that thanks to easier interoperability, comprehensive availability of cloud based application services that looks like the longest Chinese restaurant menu you’ve ever seen, and finally, unfiltered visibility into what a prospect and customer expects from us has never been clearer. This results in a much more efficient approach to deciding where to spend dollars that really really matter. Note, I didn’t say easy. I’m saying necessary yet, much easier.

That to me is optimism not only to keep the lights on in a presumably tough 2012 but also to set the foundation for what competing means way beyond the living embers from this coming forest fire.

I’ve largely taken the last few weeks off from the consumption and production treadmill to frame what I see as pivotal data points that brought us to where we are and what’s on the horizon for the next 12-18 months. This was largely a rationalization based on what were seeing with customers  as well as what I learn from the practical experience of others I have high regard for. Thought I’d put some thoughts out here on the blog.

A disclaimer: for those of you nice enough to read this blog often, some of the links will look familiar. I’ve resurfaced them to the degree they helped me look back, see where some of the pontification was ahead of its time, and where it may be relevant now.  Here goes…

On Business and Measurement

2011 is when businesses will put serious effort behind the promise of enterprise social computing and get ready to navigate a complex business and technology landscape. The first round of embracing collaboration (via social concepts at least), has been characterized by a) experimentation in some camps,  b) a concerted quest for general productivity improvement others and  c) a sort of take 2 on knowledge management. That’s a fair start. Now lets look forward.

Coming out of a recession and with massive change ahead in terms of globalization and the changing contract with customers that will  impact many an industry, most executives have critical business considerations to deal with before they can even fathom the creation of the social workplace on a little more than a leap of faith. On a more positive front, we’ve finally seen a few quarters of profit and good profit in many camps to match the hollow stock market uptick earlier in 2010. That means some budgets free up. But make no mistake – the queue for programmatic spend is now 2 years long since the 2008 crash. And so only the most surgical programs will move first.

Seems like a lifetime ago but back in the summer of 2009, I wrote that “Enterprise 2.0 is a state that Enterprises achieve by employing an appropriate set of social computing concepts.” The good news is that discrete value propositions are emerging to improve employee, customer and partner performance. Some of the largest organizations in the world such as SAP, HP, Dell, Nike, Kraft, The World Bank, Humana and 100s of others are planning or working on creating a collaborative fabric that’s constantly kept honest by decisive business process tie ins.  We’re moving from touting technology and social religion to addressing business value in discrete areas. And increasingly its not a question of ‘if’ but ‘how’ and’ when’. We’ve seen good cases in the area of customer, prospect and employee engagement. We’re now seeing new cases emerge in our work on partner and supply chain performance as well. A great collection of view points on Oscar Berg’s this years prospects for moving the ball forward.

On the measurement front, the plumbing is being put in place to see how social computing concepts take foot in some of the largest enterprises. The first round of functionality has centered on platform  and program performance. As much as that’s inadequate, that’s about how this starts in most cases. We can measure usage, sentiment, likes, engagement etc. in absolute terms. But we have some work to do to measure business performance. And silod efforts to measure performance of social initiatives based on social media monitoring tool functionality is akin to looking for a problem to solve just because you have the ability to generate a report. Expensive, anti-climactic and risky (just ask many big BI buyers).

If its not ultimately tied into central performance management efforts via the system of record enterprise bus, that makes a lot of what we have today to be analysis for analysis sake.As shiny as these new metrics units are, executives with numbers on their head can only pay so much attention to these in a vacuum. Thankfully, that’s going to start changing dramatically but that’s another show.

Yes, we’ve got ways to go. But it’s disingenuous to say that our old process-laden world excessively shackled by rigid ERP processes and experiences that don’t compute for todays workforce doesn’t require a much needed revisit. In hindsight, the repeatable part of the ‘repeatable process’ mantra, whilst brining efficiency, has been a myth in many business circumstances (more on that later). Collaboration will not fix all process failures but new innovations in engagement design and technology finally offer complimentary unstructured and fluid constructs needed to inject discussion between the “submit and cancel buttons’ on ERP screens. And that’s on the verge of becoming clear and will slowly become real as we proceed through 2011.

With coming maturity, this also means that executives will come armed with their most critical questions about the additive value of enterprise 2.0 /social business constructs to customer, employee and partner performance. That’s a given precursor to staking financial and political capital behind initiatives that can have serious business impact but can also uproot decade old practices if they miss the mark. Nothing to fret about – this is how big shifts have always evolved at every innovation inflection point. The hope of course is that its easy to separate wheat from chaff.

On Technology

I’ve built a successful consulting practice over the last decade by staying away from FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). It’s something I abhor, and I don’t plan to start subscribing now. But if there ever was a time where utter confusion and an array of often contradicting technology choices are about to present themselves, its now.

1. 1. Competing Forces: In 2010, we saw the most significant technology push in enterprise social computing with clear indication that the big players have joined the enterprise social party (SAP, Cisco, Oracle, SalesForce Chatter, and IBM). We now have 4 clear camps that bring social and collaborative technology to the market:  Pure Play Enterprise Social Software Vendors, ERP and CRM providers layering in collaboration and community features, Networking and UC providers adding social networking to VOIP and Online Meeting offerings, and finally, specialist Innovation, HR and LMS vendors extending their offerings to include collaboration.
2. 2. Go Deep or Go Wide? Consider Paul Greenberg has a 4 part Watchlist (all links included in his post) just on the CRM and Social CRM market. One particular thing that jumped out at me is a coming bifurcation of the pure play start up social software vendors either going deep into engagement and community on one hand or  on the other, focus on light weight engagement add-ons to existing collaboration and knowledge management suites with API access to other business apps.
3. 3. App Store Wars: Lots of focus on app stores that use the central activity stream as the command and control hub to access notifications and data from a host of applications. Force.com has some competition now but it’s a natural place to consider alternate appstore data touch points.

4. [Update] Microsoft SharePoint is here to stay. We’ll continue to see a relationship of co-existence between ShaprePoint and other platforms. The discourse on this issue has finally become more mature where customers are now left with options of co-habitation as well as rip and replace, appetite permitting. Thanks to JB Holston for bringing this up on Twitter.

1. 5. But Wait: Elsewhere, the CIO is also going to be distracted with tectonic shifts in the vendor landscape. Oracle now sells hardware and application software in a box. Networking giant Cisco sells servers and collaboration software. Salesforce.com now wants every cloud buyer to move from Oracle DB to Database.com. And HP just hired a seasoned Enterprise Software CEO.  Expect a lot of calls to Fortune 500 CEOs as the land grab for the enterprise IT stack starts all over again. And so, all the more reason for enterprise 2.0 and social business application vendors to get laser sharp in their messaging and go to market plans. If they had 30 minutes to make a business case in 2010, they will have 15 minutes to grab the CIOs attention in 2011.

Obviously there’s a lot more but that’s the high level backdrop from my perspective as we get busy with our lives for the rest of the year.

Lets get ready to rumble. Are you ready?

——————-

Ill close with this hilarious cartoon that Steve Wylie sent over a few days ago :–)

A few months ago I opined on the difference between Innovation and Innovation Cultures here, on this blog. It was a riff inspired by a post by Pat Lencioni on Bloomberg/Businessweek that largely dismissed Innovation programs, saying":

As heretical as that may seem to those who want to believe that “innovation is everyone’s business,” consider that even the most innovative and creative organizations need far more people to be dutiful, enthusiastic, and consistent in their work than innovative or creative.”

Whilst the general theme of bringing a huge dose of practical appeals to my thinking on management and next generation enterprises, the article takes an almost lazy swipe at all things innovation that led me to distinguish between everyone becoming full time innovators vs. fostering innovative cultures.

But it’s important to note that this line of thinking offered in BusinessWeek joins a host of voices that are questioning the basic value of innovation programs from a cost/benefit and quality perspective. I’ve seen this first hand with leadership teams we engage with: Where executives hobnobbing on golf courses originally heard about ideation programs and isolated success stories of how others found diamonds in the rough, they are also now hearing about how many of these efforts created a cesspool of ideas that have little to do with operating and financial metrics that shareholders care about.  And often, ideologists of all things “open” have fueled the fire with statements such as “there’s no such thing as a bad idea.”. The reality is that orgs continue to have a limited appetite to experiment in these recessionary times and so the pundits have a field day with pushing pessimistic and myopic strands of innovation management.

Next week I’m going to be part of the keynote line up at the Defrag Conference and will expand on this topic. There are a few important considerations for both practitioners looking to infuse innovative thinking into their organizations as well as for vendors that are pushing innovation platforms or features as part of the enterprise social software bag of tricks. Like every other area of performance acceleration via social and collaborative constructs, Innovation needs to step up, pronto. And I hope to spark a discussion on making a case for a more practical justification for infusing innovative instincts into the enterprise fabric.

This year, Defrag offers a slightly altered agenda – showcasing start up driven disruption as it has always done but also providing a cold shower balancing that with leading large enterprise thinking from the bunch of smarty pants that call themselves the Enterprise Irregulars. Many of these folks are people I consider friends or I highly respect. And I know they will kill it. In addition, look for some really smart keynotes from the likes of my former colleague, Alex Wright, Maggie Fox, Jeff Dachis, Dion Hinchcliffe, Professor Vivek Wadhwa and others.

At almost any other conference, it would be sacrilege to have so many vendors on stage. But Defrag is different. Since the topic is about disrupting the status quo of today with what can look like abstract ideas that will only gestate in the near future, it’s almost impossible to have a discussion about future trends in the absence of raw passion that only entrepreneurs can exhibit. And Defrag provides the venue for this.

When you look at the agenda at Defrag (20% discount code “spkrmagic1” here) from a birds eye view, you see a pack of hyenas (READ: a bunch of startups) hard at work, poking and prodding the Googles, Amazons, Microsofts, and Facebooks of today with radically new approaches that could disrupt service provisioning as we know it today. This is how I recently described Defrag to a customer.

Themes include:

Apps, Marketplaces and Platforms, Analytics, Crowds and Innovation, Big Data and Collaboration

So even if Innovation is not your bag, you will learn other stuff that makes you more smarter about where the proverbial puck will be. And hopefully get you thinking about how you can capitalize on these new opportunities.

See you in Colorado.

Riveting article on Bloomberg / Businessweek about how leaders really don’t want employees to innovate. Rather: “Businesses need most of their workers to carry out their primary duties with enthusiasm and consistency,” writes Pat Lencioni”

As to how organizations should lead and execute, the article opines in two seperate areas:

“What should leaders do? Be more open to new ideas from employees? Probably not. Better yet, they should stop overhyping innovation to the masses and come to the realization that only a limited number of people in any company really needs to be innovative

As heretical as that may seem to those who want to believe that “innovation is everyone’s business,” consider that even the most innovative and creative organizations need far more people to be dutiful, enthusiastic, and consistent in their work than innovative or creative.”

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know that I’m all for respecting the realities of how organizations operate today and finding a more decisive and surgical approach to leveraging the benefits of open collaborative and flatter organizational structures based on performance acceleration opportunities for client organizations. So I’m not opposed to Pats overarching message that managers need to ensure focus in innovation when it comes to meeting performance goals that have been promised to shareholders.

But here’s where this thinking goes off the rails and conforms hopelessly to the status quo (or Innovation 1.0):

Innovators vs. Innovation Cultures

There’s a difference. By organizations embracing and encouraging innovation, that really doesn’t equate to every factory worker walking off the line and putting on a lab coat. That would no doubt be asinine. Building Innovation cultures come in many flavors (see this by Hutch Carpenter on the many incarnations). It really means opening up the participatory funnel on not only suggesting but more importantly, refining the good ideas and getting the kinks out. In practical terms this means getting the big brains hidden in the corners of your enterprise to contribute unique data points (validation, rebuttals, refinement, oversight) to remove risk and enrichen outcomes. Far away from the lab or mahogany row where ideas have traditionally been hatched lies two complementary flavors of talent: practical front line customer centric views (customers, support, sales, partners, marketing) as well as deep deep component level knowledge (product developers, suppliers). Both these camps bring a heavy dose of insight that can shape execution outcomes.

Balancing The bird in hand vs. Two in a Bush

Other than that visionary CEO, when’s the last time you’ve heard leaders tout their innovation wins? They generally talk about operational and revenue wins because they manage people and products (development or sales). The problem with mahogany row innovation is that those same management realities of preferred top down innovation that Pat touts, bring along another, ugly, truth. Management systems of the last 4 decades have rewarded people managers more than subject matter experts. If you manage large numbers of people you get rewarded. If you continue to remain an individual contributor that wants to contribute deep deep subject matter expertise, theses very little room for you in the leadership ranks at most organizations. The fact is that beyond long range directional moves and high level innovation requirements to get there, operational leaders often can’t sweat the details of what might be, at the cost of managing where the dollars and cents come from today. They need the best minds across the organization to come together and execute on business innovation, whilst they keep Wall Street satiated during the next earnings call.

Ideation vs. Idea Execution

Innovation cultures support execution. The germination of innovation can often be really top down directional in many cases but with the best of the best when it comes to sourcing talent across the ecosystem (customers, employees, partners and suppliers). Citing one of our own examples, were working with one of the world best known traditional software companies facing what looks like a very dark cloud computing overcast on their core bread and butter business landscape. The realization to innovate comes decisively from the top yet together were leveraging those very core assets in place today (product know how, market positioning, incumbent customer segment needs) to innovate a shift in service delivery model, market engagement and value proposition to embrace the new opportunity.

In line with what our work covers (and the byline of this blog), I was naturally drawn to this Economist book review of “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge” by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. The book offers a reasonable approach to executing innovation that would in fact be embraced by many many leaders. This snippet of examples gets to the crux of the issue:

Nucor Corporation, a steelmaker, gives its workers bonuses if they can produce steel more efficiently. Deere & Company, a maker of farm machinery, has produced a detailed playbook on how to design new tractors.

These are distinct execution outcomes of an innovation culture – different from some notional wild west format. And I believe in sharp contrast to recent concentrated innovation efforts that were high profile failures. And beyond the few forward thinking organizations who can let innovation run loose but still reel in the big fish (for the record, I don’t have a problem with this and we work with partners and customers that live this management theory), the flavor of innovation sold by many theorists offer this often impractical mode of innovation design:

Many would-be innovators deal with the trade-off between efficiency and innovation by rejecting traditional management entirely. They repeat mantras about “breaking all the rules” and “asking for forgiveness rather than permission”. They set up skunk works (small, autonomous units with a remit to innovate) and mock the boring corporate types who write their pay-cheques. But again this is counter-productive. Mocking the corporate establishment only encourages it to starve you of resources.

In the Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson, we see definite data how our efforts to date (which includes how we have innovated to-date) is keeping us on track to approaching a big zero when it comes to return on assets. So I would suggest that we rethink unnecessarily top loading our ideation and as important, feasibility and execution. We need all big brains on deck to collaborate in more agile ways (read: wrap around new concepts more fluidly) and this book gives data on why it needs to be done ASAP. And if its decisive innovation examples you are looking for when success would have been a pipe dream without a well orchestrated concert of surgical business decisions, supplemented by a coalition of the brightest, there’s plenty in The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani on both do’s and don’ts referencing the Telco, Healthcare, CleanTech and other business sectors.

In my assessment, in practical terms, many oftoday’s leaders have little choice but to encourage some degree of an innovation culture that allows them to test, validate, dispute and confirm large scale directional changes with a broader set of talent that transcends hierarchy. Customer and market expectations and the effects of globalization are more dynamic than ever these days and the ability to see the best innovation come through whilst still delivering results today will in fact require all hands on deck. So, as leaders, before you unleash the Kidons of innovation, make sure your differentiating between decisive innovation execution and wild west idea festivals. That disciplined approach to seeing ideas through will in big part dictate the odds of long term viability.

The McKinsey Quarterly has this excellent (and sobering) piece on how a financial crisis can accelerate global economic activity. A central point of the article is that whilst commodities and foreign exchange are truly globalized by Adam Smith’s definition (the Law of One Price which states that when markets are fully formed, all customers can get the same item at the same price, regardless of location), labor continues to offer significant arbitrage in different parts of the world primarily due to exchange rate restrictions that don’t let true currency value adjust naturally. I quote:

But it’s also important to understand that emerging-market economies have a structural advantage that is grounded in the operation of the global economy. Saber-rattling Western trade negotiators frequently focus their attention on the “unnaturally” depressed exchange rates of countries such as China, and this is a component of the structural advantage to which I refer. But its roots run far deeper—all the way down to the fundamental issue that labor can’t be freely traded on a single global market, while capital and commodities can. Any company sourcing its production or service operations in a lower-wage emerging-market country therefore can save enormously on labor costs. That’s painful for displaced Western workers, but it’s good for the company’s profits, good for consumers in developed markets, and good for the newly minted citizens of the global economy who are working in emerging-market factories and call centers. This is a dynamic we take so much for granted that it’s easy to imagine it as a semi permanent condition that will underpin global economic development for the foreseeable future.

Lowell Bryan, the author, opens with the a sharp wake up call:

This article explains why we should consider that seeming improbability and examines the possibility that financial crises may accelerate the transition to a global economy with more balanced trade, capital flows, and consumption.

The write-up is just superb and every CEO whose senses a complacent reliance on current labor arbitrage in her organization (read: her profit estimates depend on it), should think again.

A financial crisis may well accelerate the transition towards a global economy with balanced labor costs, but there are two other factors that are in play here. I briefly covered both these during my keynote at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, earlier this month. Here goes…

First, it’s the developed nations that created the proverbial monster. As the western world sends work offshore, the standard of living and by extension cost of living in emerging markets are rising dramatically. More job opportunities means employees have negotiating power when it comes to wage increases. With rising wages we get shrinking labor arbitrage. So this can’t go on for ever. Labor prices will rise slowly but surely, at least in countries that are both quality labor pools as well as hot emerging markets.

Second, what needs to be taken into account is a phenomena that has far more immediate consequences that we work closely with our customers on, and that all leaders need to consider. In addition to balanced trade and perfect capital flows, we’re moving towards perfect engagement flows. And this will have a profound effect on globalization, financial crisis or not.

The web and now social network connectivity transcends geography and that’s obvious. From a business stand point, this means prospects and customers everywhere are fully aware of the global competencies of your organization (and that of your competitors) when it comes to innovation, product expertise, support and satisfaction.  If your Westin Hotels entering China, Yelp has already informed guests about the heavenly bed you offer in the U.S. If you’re Comcast and you’re entering Malaysia, new customers may want to get support from Frank’s superb team @Comcastcares and not the call center in Bangalore. That’s because the social web is putting fluid and deep engagement flows in place between markets, and possibly long before you even reached/scaled operations in some of these locales.

With emerging markets opening up, most organizations rushed to build locally relevant products and that was a great start. With open connectivity comes engagement and with that, comes knowledge sharing. Buyers today are much more aware of your global portfolio capabilities. So products will need to reflect not only local relevancy, but also global competency.

Customers expect the brightest customer support reps, product innovators, and subject matter experts to wrap around their innovation and support needs. Not where its the most cost effective for you, but where the best answers and experts reside across the globe. And so with or without a financial crisis and with or without your attention, engagement flows will accelerate global economic activity because the customer expects it.

How do you get there? You plan and design scalable 21st century collaborative enterprises that expose the talent and passion of:

• happy customers who can be objectives advocates of your expertise and your integrity
• sales and distribution partners who know the intimate needs of customers
• employees and suppliers who know the true power of your products…

…..where ever they might be.

Are you ready?

I was very disturbed to learn about the passing of Professor C.K Prahalad this morning (hat tip to Shiv Singh).

There were a few books in the 90’s that had significant influence on shaping my personal thinking about how to accelerate performance in business. Three notable ones were The Ultimate Resource (Version One made the case for how entrepreneurship was the ultimate resource but that’s out of print now), Execution and Competing for the Future, by CK Pralahad and Gary Hamel.

About the professor, from Wikipedia:

Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey for over ten years. Business Week said of him: "a brilliant teacher at the University of Michigan, he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." He was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 2000.

In this latest book, “The New Age of Innovation:

Professor Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan suggest an internal capacity to reconfigure resources in real time by focusing on clearly documented, transparent, and resilient business processes (the link between strategy, business models and operations) has become a strong differentiator.

As many of you know, I focus militantly on how the internal design of the enterprise need to be re-casted to meet the social customer’s demands and how to compete effectively. Technology differentiation as a competitive weapon played a central role in the last round of management thinking and strategy. Going forward its going to be about how effectively you can create and leverage people networks to solve business problems and get ahead by complimenting those discrete processes that have been unnecessarily fenced in by those very structured systems. Technology obviously has a critical role to play. But its a lot more than that.

Professor C.K. Prahalad was one of the few that not only pushed the boundaries on where organizations need to be interms of their thinking and wiring but he was one of the few that brought practical solutions that were cognizant of realities on the ground. More important he never lost sight of the “how” as he presented new thinking around the “what” and the “why”.

Here’s the professor on Innovation:

The Hindustan Times and Business.in have more details.

My deepest condolences to the Prahalad family and his loved ones during this difficult time. May he rest in peace.

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse."  – Henry Ford.

Somewhere there’s got to be a similar line from Steve Jobs as well.  And both have successfully belted out product after product that changed the automotive, mobile and media business, forever. All without involving the customer in a meaningful way.

So why are customer and employee led innovation programs all the rage at organizations today? Idea Management Platforms such as Bright Idea, Spigit and others are selling like hotcakes. And  Enterprise 2.0 platforms such as Jive Software and Newsgator single out this one purpose driven component and offer it as well.

Chevrons doing it, SAP’s doing it, Intuit’s doing it and lots and lots of others. And they are all involving customers, partners and employees to help them find and refine the next big idea or ways to streamline operations within organizations as a way to reduce cost and mitigate risk. And they’re saving or making millions doing so.

Come find out what the hoopla is all about at the Innovation Meetup in Mountain View this Tuesday, the 23rd of March at 6:30 pm. I’m moderating an awesome panel with Susie Wee, CTO of Client Cloud Services at HP, Tad Milbourn of Intuit and Marco ten Vaanholt, VP of SAP’s Community Network.

At Sovos, were also working on some high profile innovation programs with clients right now so it should be a lively discussion. We’re going to discuss the drivers, challenges and as important execution and follow through of successful innovation programs. Collecting ideas is one thing. Doing something about it is another. We’ll find out how the experts do it.

The event is hosted by Tatyana Kanzavelli whose now legendary in Silicon Valley for producing intimate, high quality events.

More about the event from the Meet Up website:

Innovation has been dubbed as one of the more promising purpose-driven applications of social and collaborative technology in the enterprises. Whether as a way to encourage customers or internal employees, Innovation Programs in enterprises have unlocked critical ideas at well known enterprises that has ultimately led to the conception of new product ideas, significant cost savings internally and finally, operational efficiency. Sameer Patel, founding partner at the Sovos Group will moderate a session to highlight the opportunity and challenges that organizations face as they seek to unlock critical insight coming from customers, partners and employees.

Learn more about the panelists and the event and register on the Meet Up site here. It’s $20 online and $30 at the door. Food and wine included.

Hope to see you there.