Crowdsourcing is a technique that progressive companies are using to translate the enthusiasm of their most highly-engaged customers into valuable marketing, branding, or product-development insight. Dean van Leeuwen, TomorrowToday’s UK and European director, who has an MBA and extensive work experience in marketing, looks at this new trend and provides practical guidelines for customer-led organisations.
The opening line of the best selling business book of all time is as succinct as it is true: “Good is the enemy of great”. Jim Collins’ 2001 bestseller, “Good to Great” explains how most companies never become great because they are already good. They have become prisoners to their past – not feeling any need to push boundaries, innovate, prepare for the unexpected, stretch themselves or make necessary changes to ensure sustainable success. Dr Graeme Codrington argues that this is a recipe for disaster, that only future-focused leadership – who have the guts to look forward and not back – can avert.
In this article, Keith Coats, our resident leadership expert, visits one of his favourite themes: the company as a village. He explains the four key requirements for developing successful and resilient organisations: belonging, mastery, independence and generosity.
Many people will agree with Pete Laburn, strategy consultant and part of TomorrowToday’s network, that strategy just doesn’t work in most companies. Its either about just getting a plan done for head office, or we actually don’t have the time to lift our heads above the daily grind to see into the future. In this article, Pete argues that there is one dominant reason why strategies fail, and that is that the only strategy that organisations will deliver is the one that they are capable of delivering. He suggests three critical elements for developing organisational capability for implementing strategies.
In the many strategic sessions we run, we usually ask delegates “Who feels frazzled in their work?” Response to this question at is inevitably almost 100%. And when challenged as to why this happens, the usual answer is that ‘that’s the way it is today’. When pushed on just how enjoyable or satisfying their work is, delegates eyes glaze over, they shrug their shoulders, in apparent resignation that this is their lot in life, and the only possible way to cope in today’s world.
Buppies – Black yuppies. Black young upwardly mobile professionals. Research shows that this is one of the fastest growing demographic groups in South Africa, but many companies and leaders have no idea how to manage them. Aloysias Maimane, a new member of the TomorrowToday team and a top South African presenter and facilitator, provides some insights into this important group.
For those who travel regularly to different cultures, you know the nightmare of arriving in a new country and realising that you don’t know some important local customs. I’m not talking about the customs officials at the airport, but rather issues like do you tip the taxi driver, and if so, how much. Do you tip the porter at the hotel, or the waitress at the restuarant?
Then, you probably also know the frenzy of trying to work out the power adaptors and trying to get your laptop juiced up (its battery-life died somewhere over the Indian Ocean, right in the middle of an important email).
OK, so maybe you don’t care, but I have just found two great websites, and need a place to put them so I can remember them:
While doing the research for the above sites, I came across a great one that seems to list everything in one place: http://www.kropla.com/.
A nice innovation is being experimented with by Air France, JAL, Singapore and Virgin airlines. They will now be offering in-flight language tutorials on selected routes, helping passengers to learn a few key words and phrases of the language of the country of their destination. This is based on an interactive audiovisual language program developed by Berlitz, the company that supplies many in-flight entertainment screens. The system currently supports 23 languages.
This is an example of a massive trend – consumers are demonstrating a value shift from passive consumption to mastering skills. The smartest companies are offering their customers the opportunity to add to their skill set, not just consume a service or product.
Friends Provident, a UK insurance company, recently released a press release about research they have done into the Boomer generation who are about to start retiring. I like the title they selected: “Freetirement”. Here is their press release:
The Freetirement Generation report was commissioned by Friends Provident and is based on independent research undertaken by the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) in January and February 2007.
Growing old today is neither about sitting by the fire nor is it about wakeboarding. Its characterised by the freedom to choose between these and many other options.Freedom of beliefs, lifestyles, careers, and money is the characteristic of the ageing Baby Boomer generation. Its often overlooked or misrepresented in public discussion of the older generations. More often than not, the media represents older people as degenerating caricatures or eccentrics trying to recapture a lost youth. Old people are either polishing their bifocals in front of the television or sailing solo around the world, skydiving and knitting underwater.
I am doing some work in Uganda at the moment. Last night, I watched the “African Idols” TV show. Its down to the last five, and these young people really let it rip. (A few weeks ago, flipping through channels back in South Africa, I saw enough of the preliminary rounds to be cured of the myth that “all Africans can sing” – a fair number of them were awful). But, there is something that concerns me, and I hope I can express it properly.
The problem occurs to me at various levels, but its about identity. especially African identity. Here are the symptoms:
The first time I heard about the AACS ’secret’ code (AACS is the anti-copying system built into HD-DVDs) being aired on the net, was the user revolt on Digg that made news on the blogosphere.
Then this morning while browsing through BoingBoing I came across another post with images, songs, tatoos and other fun things people are doing to basically lift a middle finger to the establishment.
Whether you agree with what’s happening or not, the lesson sits in a changing business environment where you can’t behave like you used to. While officials were threatening to sue every web site that carried the code…..
“The AACS Licensing Authority, which controls the anti-copying technology underlying HD-DVD, sent out hundreds of legal threats to sites that had posted the key, including Digg.”
…the code was being spread everywhere.
“Right now, 368,000 pages contain the number, up from 36,000 yesterday. Good luck getting the food coloring out of the swimming pool!”
You need to know that I am grumpy. At 1:29am this morning, my electricity was turned back on – after 3 days of being off. I mean completely off – nada, nothing – since Monday night at 3am. Then, as I dragged myself out of bed for a 4am wake up to get to the airport, I discovered that the municipality, in order to make up for actually supplying me electricity, had shut my water supply off. So, sitting on an airplane next to some poor soul, I have not yet had a morning shower. And, to top it all, when I arrived at Joburg airport, the check in system had crashed and the queues were out the building. Remarkably, it looks as if we land in Cape Town on schedule. But more of that below, with some lessons for everyone.
The facts
The suburb I live in (most of the time), Bedfordview – on the east of Johannesburg – is serviced by two major electrical supplies – a primary supply and a backup cable. These are underground cables, laid in 1978.So, what lessons can be learned…
I don’t know if you ever finish a book and feel like something different has happened? Something different to how you feel after finishing other books? Today I finished “The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Bill Bryson. I felt something different. It’s difficult to explain what, but I felt it at a deeper level than usual. Felt it in a different place and felt a different kind of thing. And while I can’t really pin-point where or what, I do know it felt good. I finished, put the book down, and just sat, stared, tried to think, feel, ….. and when nothing really special happened, I just got up and moved onto the next thing.
It’s a clever book, and being my first Bryson book, I assume it’s clever in the way that he’s known and talked about to be clever. It’s about him growing up in the 1950’s. But it’s really about America, Des Moines, to be specific in the 1950’s. And while I’m not American in any way, shape or form, I knew enough to appreciate and connect with much of what he reflected on.
It’s also about the changes that happened in America and the world toward the end of the 1950’s and the beginning of the 1960’s.
If I had to sum the book up, it would be in a sentence Bryson ‘pens’ on page 267 of the copy I was reading. Toward the end of the book. It was a sentence that grabbed hold of me and I haven’t been able to shake it off. It possibly, probably in fact, says more about me than about the book and what Bryson was trying to say. But perhaps not? Perhaps I’m right on the button?
“We were entering a world where things were done because they offered a better return, not a better world.”
Definitely worth a read : )
I spend a large part of my year in conversation with managers working hard to try and understand today’s younger workforce. The pain they’re feeling is palpable. The evidence of change is overwhelming. Making the necessary changes, at times, seems impossible. The hope is that the challenges are being interrogated and slowly but surely acted [...]
Everyone agrees that something must be done about executive pay. One of the major contentious issues emerging out of the financial crisis is the way that senior executives and manager, especially in the financial industries, are remunerated. These days, executive pay often seems to be unrelated to the company’s performance, and in many [...]
For years banks and credit card companies have held a strangle hold over the movement of money and charged exorbitant rates for doing so. Now this is changing and fast.
Michale Ivey the founder of Twitpay has devised a system, using code that PayPal made available to him, that allows people to make payments [...]
In the last few hours the 10 billionth tweet was tweeted on Twitter. As one would imagine there was all kinds of hype and excitement, as Tweeps with the necesary skills attempted to predict the time it would happen, and I imagine even be ‘the one’?
My last tweet was 9999989724. Wild. Will be at 10 [...]
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