• Do all these assumptions have any support in reality?
• Do people make the distinction between lobby and traffic of influence?
• Which are the most efficient lobbying tools?
• How many actors are there lobbying?

This is why a research was needed and answers are given – for details please see:

http://www.reglementare-lobby.ro/rezultatele-cercetarii-lobby-in-romania/

For the moment the report is only available in Romanian. An English version will soon be available.

Image via Wikipedia

One of the most challenging questions… Will enterprises benefit of Web 2.0 deployments and will such technology improve performance?

On the one hand you see by far too much time spent on Facebook these days and statements like “my whole life is there” are not such unussual amongst the young generation. Therefore, the question is not how you make them use it (they already do) but what benefit you have as a company from using such technologies?

McKinsey’s conclusion is that companies are improving their mastery of social technologies, using them to enhance operations and exploit new market opportunities (“How social technologies are extending the organization,” McKinsey Quarterly, November 2011). They asked 4,261 global executives how their organizations deploy social technologies, including social networking, blogs, video sharing and microblogging, and the benefits gained. The 2011 survey reports that when adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share, also confirming last year’s survey results.

I find not quite spectacular the four clusters that emerge from McKinsey’s analysis:
1. Executives at internally networked organizations note the highest improvement in benefits from interactions with employees;
2. Executives at externally networked organizations note the highest improvement in interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers;
3. Executives at fully networked organizations report greater benefits from both internal and external interactions (this result is easy to be assumed out of the first two);
4. In the fourth and by far the largest group, developing organizations, respondents report lower-than-average improvements across all interactions at their organizations.

It’s clear that there is an improvement in communication, especially for large inter-regional organisations but you don’t need a study to know that. What I would be interested in is how this is linked to performance on the job also this would be more difficult to find out once it becomes a way of life and business. Looking ahead three to five years, many respondents expect still more profound organizational changes. They say that with fewer constraints on social technologies at their companies:

• Boundaries among employees, vendors and customers will blur.

I would raise a red flag here as this might be a signifficant risk management issue.

• More employee teams will be able to organize themselves.

I would consider it one of the most relevant benefits.

• Data-driven decision-making will rise in importance.

I’d also add a red flag here considering that Web 2.0 gathers unstructured data and the real challenge will be how to manage such information in a structured way.

I realised how true this was and how much syncretism it involvs:

1. Nobody is irreplaceable. This merely means that if you think you are irreplaceable you must be nobody.
2. On the other hand, it doesn’t say that no soul is irreplaceable; it just states that no “body” is irreplaceable. As simple as this.

What else is there left out?

In this RSAnimate, Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain as part of the RSA’s free public events programme.

To view the full lecture, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk

Many thanks to Chris Collison who pointed this out.

Image by okfn via Flickr

At the end of the 90’s, KM challenges were addressed through technology-based solutions. When you told someone about KM, they would reply with a tool or a software-driven initiative; usually a corporate-wide one. It took a few years to find out that an IT project would not solve the need of knowledge and would not necessarily improve knowledge sharing culture within company.

Later on, KM was perceived not along with IT but rather with HR. To comply with both, a key message soon became that organizations have to acknowledge people over technology as the active protagonists in knowledge-sharing. And now we come to the next step: processes. KM later was associated to managing processes and understanding the knowledge flow. So, where does KM fit in at the end? Does it need a separate entity? Should it be part of something else?

After reviewing a large number of situations, reports and statistics, I see that there are two situations:

1. KM is perceived as a response to a strategic need (especially after the downturn) that often even remains unidentified. They call it somehow else but they are trying to manage knowledge flows, have a knowledge-sharing culture and even build some IT if necessary. As KM is not defined, it’s not even called that way.

or

1. Top management perceives KM as something they “must do” to be ahead of competition. They say they are engaged to harmonizing knowledge-sharing processes across the organization but the exact reasons why they are strategically implementing KM is still not very clear. As KM is defined, it is established as an individual separate entity from other organisational structures.

So, again, where does KM fit in? Any experience is different but here might be similarities we can work on to better understand how this is developing.

A few years ago I’ve seen the speech below. I considered it one of the most inspiring ever and I still do. If there is anything I will remember about Steve Jobs in the coming years, I believe this is it. He held the speech at the Stanford’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.

Image by Wim Hazenhoek. via Flickr

The world’s largest economy, the US, is still spluttering along, the eurozone is trying to avert a sovereign debt crisis and Japan has lapsed back into recession after a devastating natural disaster.

The slowdown in some key developed markets and the tightening of monetary policy in emerging markets has impacted negatively on global trade and industrial production volumes. In a recent study, PwC expects this is evidence of a temporary blip and not a permanent dip – volumes will recover, but with an ever increasing focus on emerging markets as customers and not just producers.

Tensions over currencies have been off the front pages in the first half of 2011, but there is potential for another flare up in the near term, as the underlying causes of the contention have yet to be resolved.

The extent of the economic damage caused by the Japanese earthquake took some time to become apparent. The scale of the disruption caused to the supply chains of manufacturing firms was larger than expected (particularly in the automotive sector), which plunged the economy back into recession in the first quarter of 2011.

The US economy has also experienced a slowdown in recent months, with the economy expanding well below trend in Q1 2011, and there has been soft data emerging from the US labour and housing markets and the manufacturing sector since the start of the year.

The main body of the reconstruction phase of the response to the recent Japanese earthquake will help boost world GDP growth to 3.6% in 2012. The general upswing in growth in 2012 is expected to be driven by improved growth performance in some of the G7 economies such as Japan, US, UK, and the Central and Eastern European countries like Russia and Poland. These countries are expected to be boosted by increased global trade, recovering consumer spending and lower levels of uncertainty surrounding global economic prospects.

You can see the full Global Economy Brief report here.

Image by the tartanpodcast via Flickr

Too many companies view marketing plans as little more than an exercise in where and when to buy media placement. Yet as the number of digital interactions increases, marketers must recognize the power that lies beyond traditional paid media.

The changing role of older media and the emergence of newer ones extend the marketer’s role well beyond the allocation of budgets and channels. Marketers today require a deep understanding of how consumers engage with different types of media at each stage of the journey toward a purchase decision. McKinsey’s study “Beyond paid media: Marketing’s new vocabulary” splits the media in 5 categories: paid, owned, earned, sold, and hijacked and makes an analysis of how media are evolving nowadays.

What’s there to think about?

1. Media are becoming more integrated. New ways to connect with customers, for example, are transforming traditional relationship management by requiring marketers to interact with consumers through multiple forms of media in increasingly personalized ways. JetBlue has promoted its Twitter offering through many channels, for instance, and now has about 1.6 million followers seeking a regular feed of special deals for tickets. This approach has given JetBlue the ability to deliver timely coupons at a minimal variable cost, reducing its reliance on expensive paid media while fostering closer relationships with consumers.

2. New publishing models are emerging because the increasing complexity of consumer needs. Computer maker Dell and automobile manufacturer Nissan, for example, worked with the Sundance Channel to create a television talk show hosted by Elvis Costello to attract their target demographic. With ads that seamlessly blended into the show’s content, Dell and Nissan not only gained exposure to a highly engaged audience but also shifted the perception of their brands to connect with Generation X.

3. Applications on wireless devices are spawning tools that provide useful information. For example, eBay’s Red Laser generates a list of prices for any product whose bar code has been scanned by a mobile phone. Beverage companies show where their products are available by overlaying icons onto maps on the screens of mobile phones. In Japan, food manufacturers can increase sales across entire product categories through marketing collaborations with platforms such as Cookpad, the country’s leading online recipe site, with 9 million members, more than 40 percent of whom are women in their 30s.

4. Marketing experiences are becoming more personally relevant. McDonald’s in Japan, for example, has developed expertise in the use of Twitter and other blogging platforms to promote new products and promotions by leveraging its huge fan base to talk about how much they love the company’s food. While this fan promotion is sometimes spontaneous, it’s often facilitated and encouraged by providing these fans with free meals. In this way, paid- and owned-media efforts (such as blog and Twitter campaigns) make consumers so enamored of McDonald’s products that the company generates a significant amount of earned media.

5. The evolution of new kinds of media means that consumers are engaging more often in real-time conversations, particularly on social networks and other digital platforms. One consumer electronics company, for example, has recognized the significance of every review or rating posted about its products. It now responds to all comments within 24 hours: positive feedback gets a thank you, an invitation to become a Facebook friend, and special offers; negative reviews get explanations of how to fix issues, instructions on how to navigate an interface more easily, or follow-up questions to learn more about what the consumer didn’t like. Some hotel chains, recognizing the importance of travel sites (such as the popular TripAdvisor), likewise encourage satisfied guests to post comments online, while employing staff to follow and answer negative comments.

For more details please see McKinsey’s study.

I presented a KM tool this year twice for two different groups in the same company. Once in January and once in June. In January the audience was aged around 30 and over with at least some years of work experience. In June I had people around 20 or slightly over, I assume most of them new joiners.

The presentation was highly interactive, practice-based, with no PowerPoint but… what a difference between the two groups! The first one showed an interest in all aspects of the tool, asked relevant questions to clarify how they can use it best for their own projects and you could see the thrill when they found something new. The second group did not ask many questions and when they did there was more a superficial clarification of functionalities. Moreover, even if it was a new tool for them and highly applicable for their daily job, the thrill of discovery was just not there…

This made me thinking about the new generation. How do you get their attention and what would be a better way to train these people?

Working environment

Raised in an educational culture of working in teams and being highly socially connected through computers, cell phones, text messaging, instant messaging, social networking, blogs, multi-player gaming, etc., the new generation is extremely social-centric. They are building relationships virtually and they are bringing a culture of constantly working together into the workplace – wherever that is. They make sure their friends remain “in the know” by sharing information such as articles, job opportunities or YouTube videos. It is a continual habit – not daily, but hourly.

Education

Statistically, generation Y (and Z) will be the most educated generation ever. According to the “UNESCO Global Education Digest 2010″ the number of secondary education students rose from 195 million in 1970 to 526 million in 2008, meanwhile, the number of tertiary students increased by six times over the same period, from 32 million to 159 million students in 2008.

Is this relevant? How much do this change the interest they will show in doing their job at the highest standards? Does this mean they will be ready for a life-long learning environment? In some cases it may be so but I’m not convinced about the majority. Education nowadays is a “must have” because you cannot find a proper job otherwise but I see way too much superficial behaviour here. You can do a paper work a lot faster by web searching today than you could have done it 5 or 6 years ago (needless to say 15 years ago) but you don’t pay much time analysing the information and its sources. Issues such as credibility of sources have melt down into wiki and blog posts. In this way you may have time to chat or post a joke on Facebook but this will not make you a better performer at your work place.

Training

When it comes to learning IBM has found different age groups respond best to different methods of training and professional development. Baby Boomers prefer the traditional structure of a classroom and teacher. Generation X typically opts for online courses that are self-paced, while Generation Y benefits more from social-based learning approaches.

I do agree with IBM’s results. The new generation needs an informal learning environment and messages have to be short and action based. It’s the culture. You need to communicate to them with some of the techniques used in advertising. You have to advertise your new tool the same way you would do with a new tooth paste. Otherwise, they will not be interested in using it. It just won’t create the buzz!

Thinking about all these I reached the conclusion that the best presentation for the new generation is a 160 characters speech. Maybe, just maybe, this “twitter-like” message would have a chance.

And just wait for Generation Z…

Update: 28 October 2011

I read today an interesting article from Knowledge and Innovation Network: Six little words

It seems I’ve been too generous with the 160 characters speech. Here are some links on storytelling using six words:

• http://www.sixwordstories.net/
• http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html