Mind work is tricky...

When we think about knowledge work productivity, it is a very tricky subject.  The reason it is tricky is because at one extreme we can routinize knowledge work — as when someone is calling to fill out a survey, or answer a customer service call.  In a low value added knowledge work task, there is some variation, and the motivation and attitude of the employee is still a very big and important deal (See Dick Walton’s Book Up & Running for an excellent discussion of commitment versus compliance based controls while implementing technology in organizations), but in the main, you can structure the work just the way you analyze and structure work in a factory.  Frederick Taylor’s rules of scientific management with a dose of the worker involved, edge-based, data-driven approach of the Toyota Production System, can guide the design and management of the work.

Many organizations have over routinized knowledge work in a way that creates as many problems as it solves.  All of us have experienced the frustration of calling a call center to solve a problem to only have the poor employee say something akin to, “Sorry, I know we should be able to fix that but I don’t have the authority and the computer won’t let me do it.”  That is an over routinization of work.  This is present in many companies.  For example, insurance companies have often gone back and forth between treating claims like a production line in which each worker turns their own intellectual screw, to one in which the work is organized by teams of case workers who take each claim from start to finish.  Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

In this low end knowledge work there are many simple things to fix — especially around technology.  If software would rust, these would be more obvious.  In many customer service systems, for example, we have the equivalent of a very messy physical factory.  There are multiple customer numbers; systems don’t integrate; the response times are too long, the data are a mess — in short, if it were physical instead of digital it would look like a poorly managed factory of the 1950s.  These can all be analyzed for process and economic improvement.  They are not easy to do because most organizations have few true program and project managers, but these often valuable changes are easy to figure out for any experienced practitioner of process/technology improvements.

At the high end of knowledge work, I think we should turn to Doug Englebart, whose work has been aimed at helping highly skilled groups of people solve complex, interdependent tasks better and faster.  He often referred to “raising the collective IQ of the group”.  This is a very different animal than the tailorized call center work.  If we stay in insurance, this type of task would be to deal with a complex commercial risk such as insuring an ecological risk of the new fracking technology.  This type of complex, idiosyncratic, team-based work cannot be fully serialized, or automated.  Instead, one needs to look at the factors Englebart identified in his HLAM-T model.  In this approach he suggest that any complex work has a human being, with a language system, and artifact and a method — HLAM.  In addition, this person can be trained in the language system, the method and the artifact, which is where the T in HLAM-T comes from: training.

We see great examples of this model at investment banks in trading operations.  The trader has both a set of “quants” whose job it is to come up with new methods within the language system.  Some of these quants can also code C++, Java, and they know the bank’s systems and data feed from outside sources.  These are the bitsmiths I’ve written about before.  They create the artifacts which embody the method and use the language system of the knowledge workers (in this case the traders).  In fact, because the investment banks have made so much money on these traders (we’ll see how this plays out under Dodd-Frank, but that’s another story), the banks were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to pay these bitsmiths to help the trader earn millions which made the bank tens or hundreds of millions.  At the very high end, knowledge work productivity is very skewed, but only a few organizations actually spend money rationally to drive the differential productivity of the very top end of their talent pool.

I have lamented before that we are too focused on automating knowledge work and not enough on Englebart’s ideas.  I think that opportunity still confronts every firm.

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Co-authored with Chris Curran

Never before has such a mass of data existed. Needless to say, all this information complicates the decision-making process. Businesses need new strategies to answer the biggest question:

How do we effectively sift through the mountain of information to gain valuable insights.

Layers is a term we use for visual information systems that combine publicly available and company-owned tools to present relevant and contextual information-in a format that starts with the decision and works in reverse.

By Layers, we’re referring to distinctive “chunks” of data that are presented within the construct of a decision, rather than in the context of a tool. Layers are also about leveraging data, tools, and innovation on the Web instead of starting from scratch.

Layers of information exist at all levels-individual, company, market, industry, country, and international.

They are what help us visualize the different levels of data and how we can put them together in ways that support a particular insight. More powerful than a tool, layers comprise an “organizational solution”-a visual way to sort and sift a mass of information and arrive at an insight efficiently, effectively, and by putting all employees on the same page to create buy-in.

So why aren’t organizations making more progress in adopting layering options? Simply put, you can either embrace the flood of data or ignore it. Here are a few observations that may make it easier to embrace:

1. When something new pops up in the Web, other sites swarm to analyze it. How can your firm harness this speed to market? The emergence of Twitter and the hundreds of tools to analyze Twitter data is just one example.
2. Recently, Nielsen conducted a study that looked at successful new product launches across 30 large consumer packaged goods companies and found a correlation between successful, innovative product introductions and how differing levels of executive involvement affect launches. When senior leadership is involved at your firm, does it help or hinder the adoption of new ideas?
3. When we visualize our organization, we often think of a map. What if the data that aided our decision-making was available as layers of information on a map, similar to how Google Maps layer satellite images with public transit, bike routes, and points of interest?

So, how does “layering” help us?

1. By starting with tools and data that already exist in the market – data collection, organization and decision making is faster
2. Focusing on a layer at a time creates is iterative and less complex to implement
3. A visual representation of the decision-making-context makes solutions more recognizable and required less “context switching” for those using it

Faster + Iterative + Recognizable = Faster Decision Making

We spend too much time analyzing the mountains of data we have collected, assuming that it contains answers to our business questions. Why not start with the decisions we are trying to make and working our way backward with the help of the data? Does your business have a decision-making model?

If we start with decisions and then add the context for those decisions, we can support the business in a much more direct way. What area of your organization could benefit from a “layered” decision-making process?

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I recently had the good fortune of leading our Diamond Exchange, where we discussed how companies could create competitive advantage through better use of data.  For this event we created a short (3-4 min) video to help business executives get a feel for just how quickly the torrent of information is increasing.  If you are having a hard time getting someone in your life to understand how quickly things are changing — feel free to show them this.

Serious organizations care about this flood of information.  In fact, if you look at the core of a host of great companies: Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, UPS, Amazon, you find a digital heart and brain.  Each of these companies do a superior job of gathering, organizing, analyzing and acting on the data that streams through their organizations and in their markets.  (See also my 1995 Harvard Business Review article on Exploiting the Virtual Value Chain.)  As Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book Too Big to Fail pointed out, Goldman has an integrated securities database called SecDB, which gives them a complete picture of their positions around the globe, which in turn, allows them to exercise superior risk management and pricing.  Wal-Mart’s automation and information advantage have been reported so extensively as to make it almost cliche.  Under the covers of most great companies is a high information IQ.

Why?  Why is information processing capability so essential to the robust functioning of large complex enterprises?  There are at least five reasons:

• First, information is an organizational problem.  If a firm allows data to slosh around with the carelessness that old factories used to handle work in process inventory, the inefficiencies multiply.  Heck, every personal productivity guru starts with advice that includes the importance of handling information once, and only once.
• Second, information are the reflexes of the organization.  The military talk about “operating within the OODA Loop of the enemy”.  Observe, orient, decide and act is the decision cycle of any combatant, and if you can do it better and faster than the enemy — you can usually win.  The same holds for non-lethal competitions.
• Third, superior information usually enables better negotiating leverage.  If you know the true demand and supply in a marketplace, you can usually extract a significant price advantage over your competition.  The entire discipline of programmed trading, which accounts for a significant part of profits of Wall Street firms, is built on the premise of profit by superior information.
• Fourth, dominating data allows an organization to manage its risk better.  If UPS knows that there are forest fires in Russia, the company can change its routes, assets and operations to lower risk and improve service.
• Fifth, it creates a culture of managerial excellence when executives operate from the numbers, not just their gut.  I know Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink has popularized the notion of going with your gut, but, I’m still too much of a hard headed capitalist to not look at the facts first if I can.

So, you have to ask yourself, are you taming the torrent or getting swamped by it?  Now’s the time to ask, because things are only going to get worse, or better, depending on if you’re surfing or drowning!

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One of my colleagues just asked me: What’s the difference between a vendor relationship and a true business partnership?  This is a vital question when any individual or firm is innovating, because when anyone is doing something truly new, it is impossible to pre-specify everything needed from a vendor — because you are busy creating something never seen before!

Of course there is a legal definition of a business partnership, but I’m interested in the broader idea of what creates a vibrant commercial affiliation.  Five things came to my mind that differentiate a “vendor” from a “business partner”:

1. Partnership has mutual vulnerability and risk sharing.  Vendor relationships can be contracted to have this type of dependence, but usually they do not.  Vendors often work to the letter of the agreement, but partners are willing to do what it takes to make the other party whole.
2. Partnership means you work together to create new possibilities in the future.  Usually, vendor relationships look backward — to what was, not what could be.
3. Partnership means that you have a social as well as a commercial connection.  In every partnership agreement I have been involved in, there is a mix of personal as well as commercial commitment to each other.
4. Partnership means that you are willing to leave important things unspecified in the interests of flexibility, and due to trust.  This may be the most important part from the point of view of innovating together.  Those joint ventures or agreements that begin by fighting over the intellectual capital or products that will be created, rarely get off the ground.
5. Perhaps most importantly partnership means that you live to the spirit of the agreement, not the letter of it.

Given the cynicism of the current media environment, and the speed with which business is transforming, those firms that are able to create true partnerships will get differential opportunity and customer longevity.  Plus, it’s more fun.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by soldiersmediacenter

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There is much talk about innovation — and there are many approaches to creating new things, from the famous “open innovation” ideas of Henry Chesbrough to the ever popular notions of Clay Christensen about “disruptive innovation“.  Whether it was the popisicle, invented by accident by Frank Epperson when he left his stirring stick in a mixture of soda water powder and water on a porch over a particularly cold night that yielded the prototype of this frozen confection which inspired Frank to build a business of making popsicles, or the invention of the universal credit card by Frank X McNamara in 1949 who went out to lunch with Alfred Bloomingdale, the grandson of the founder of the famed Bloomingdale’s store, and did not have cash on hand to pay for the meal, so he vowed to never be in the same situation again — the story of innovation comes in many shades and hues.

One question I often get from senior executives is: how important is innovation to me?  The answer for new industries is clear: innovation wins the game.  In mature industries, like PC software or home construction, executives must ask themselves: is my industry in danger of dematuring?  By dematuring, I mean does a stable industry with known competitors begin to be dynamic and new again?  If your industry is dematuring, the chances of you getting hit with a disruptive innovation are much greater and  established players lose their hegemony while value in the industry can move to entirely new players or parts of the value chain.

An industry is in danger of dematuring if two or more of the following four things happen simultaneously:

1. customer’s core requirements change;
2. the core technologies used to produce the product or service change;
3. the number of large competitors interested in the same market is on the rise;
4. significant regulation, deregulation, or re-regulation is coming down the pike.

Just one of these shifts is unlikely to change up the status quo; two or more is more likely and three or more is almost certain to spell increase dematuring and thereby great potential for disruption in your industry.

Here are some industries current undergoing disruption:

• Publishing: including newspapers, magazines, and books;
• Telecommunications: including the provision of access as well as the end consumer devices themselves;
• Software: both at the consumer and enterprise level;

There are some industries which are not undergoing this type of fundamental change:

• Construction
• Furniture
• Appliances

Here are some industries that may “de-mature” soon if different, promising technologies begin to become mainstream.

• Automobiles.  If electric cars take off the entire set of attributes and core technologies will change radically and allow new entrants to join the fray;
• Insurance.  If telemetry enables any asset to be tracked and traced, the pricing and use of insurance may change radically;
• Energy.  If any of the future bio-diesel or photovoltaic technologies that have a very different cost curve come onto the scene, then there could be a wholesale reconfiguration of what people buy, how they buy it, and who provides it — not to mention the new regulations and incentives that might be part of a disruptive transformation.

Companies that sit in industries that are dematuring must have a vigorous approach to scanning for new potential competitors from traditional and non-traditional sources.  Further they need to be willing to invest much more in more transformative innovations — such as Comcast’s Fancastic effort to stream new video content to their end consumers — a large and risky adventure.

Companies in mature industries such as construction need not look so vigorously at innovation, except as it helps them to incrementally reduce cost or differentiate their product.  Toll Brothers construction should be more worried about lobbying congress for new home-buyer relief than investing in innovation.

The trickiest are those companies that may demature — because they need to monitor carefully, and be ready to act, but not jump in too quickly.  For example, in telematics, leading insurance companies like Progressive and Allstate have been experimenting with new services and pricing.  They need to have the capability to move quickly in the marketplace if these new modes of customer demand come to fruition.  With the advent of the open mobile phone platform of the iPhone and the Android, we might have an “on-demand” insurance application at any moment and if it goes past the tipping point of adoption, these giants will need to respond and quickly.

So, is your industry dematuring and do you have the right approach to innovation to deal with it?

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Last week, on Thursday night September 16, 2010, I had the good fortune of speaking to the Society for Information Management’s (SIM’s) Boston chapter about the implications of social media.  You can get the slides here.

The core of the talk was the idea that we are entering a third wave of capitalism, and further that two of the most central tenets of capitalism are the collective absorption of risk and the ability to self organize.  The first wave was born with the creation of the “shared stock” company in which the owners could spread the risk to create new ventures too risky for any individual or the crown.  John Jacob Astor, the famous fur and real estate magnate came to the United States shortly after the revolutionary war and began a number of firms, including the American Fur Company, which helped to make Astor America’s wealthiest man when he passed away.  His fortune today if compared to the nation’s GDP, is calculated by Forbes to be worth $110 billion — more than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined.  Astor, to me, is a great example of first wave capitalism.  Collective risk absorption allowed Astor to grow.

Second wave capitalism rose on the back of the twin innovations of the railroad and the telegraph. Historian Alfred Chandler carefully documented the evolution of the large, complex and modern corporation — arising from the Scale and Scope (which Chandler’s book of that name documents so well) of commerce enabled by the ability to move all manner of goods across the entire nation (or across Europe) in a very short time (3 days for the US), and with great control over the process of shipment through the use of the telegraph.  The capital needed to build the railroads and the telegraphy system created the demand that helped to launch the modern capital markets we still use today.  William Crapo Durant, a man with a most unfortunate middle name, was the father of General Motors.  He built the company and lost due to financial pressures.  Then, working with the upstart Louis Chevrolet, Durant managed to take over GM again, only to lose it again due to his over aggressive financing and expansion efforts.  To me, GM, founded by this courageous entrepreneur, and then well managed through the middle of the 1900′s was a shining example, of Second Wave capitalism — growing to a size and complexity never seen by the world before. There were many other examples too: DuPont, Swift, Sears, AT&T, among others.  GM, and these other firms, could never have reached the scale and efficiency they achieved without collective absorption of risk, and massive self organization of supply, demand, and management.

In this Third Wave of Capitalism, which I think we are beginning to experience now, we have the commercial miracle of the internet.  The internet give us standard parts for knowledge work, communication, and data transport.  Like the telegraph and railroads before it, it provides an unprecedented base upon which to build business models.  An excellent example is the founding of YouTube by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen & Jawed Karim, all alums of PayPal.  The company was founded as a venture backed start up in November 2005, and was sold to Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.

I argued that the reason that it was possible to create $1.65 billion in value in only a year was that YouTube is riding atop a standard, global infrastructure that enables massive self organization — and end user participation at a new level.  Like the waves before it, this infrastructure creates a space for new business models like Google, Twitter, Foursquare and others.

The great news for all of us is that every time there is a new platform for collective absorption of risk, and self organization of resources and drive, there is a huge explosion in the creation of wealth and new products and services for consumers.  I think we are just at the start of such a revolution.

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The other day I received a downright inspirational email from my friends at IndieGoGo, a site dedicated to the collaborative funding of ideas.  (Here’s a short video of my friend Slava Rubin, co-founder of the company.)  The missive pointed to a video featuring 9 year old Jackie Evancho a rising America’s Got Talent star who belts out To Where You Are.

It wasn’t the song, which I don’t like, nor the fact that it was performed by a very talented child, that inspired me.  What I found motivating was the fact that such an unknown could go directly to her audience for funding.

In creative work, there are three risks:

• execution risk — will the new work be any good?
• financing risk — with the artist or patrons make money on their investment?
• marketing risk — will we get to the audience in an efficient manner and motivate them to buy?

What is so, so cool about IndieGoGo and other crowdfunding sites is that they completely change the financing and risk structure of creative work.  The implications are profound.

1. By “sourcing” the financing, crowdfunding collapses finance and marketing risk.  When people pony up cash for little Jackie, they are already identifying themselves as people who are willing to buy the product.  Financing IS marketing, and marketing IS financing.
2. Crowdfunding lowers the minimum efficient scale of making something new. Jackie only needs $7,000.  If she had an agent, and other intermediaries in the mix, this effort would blow through orders of magnitude more money before she was actually in touch with her audience.  With crowdfunding she starts with her audience.
3. Crowdfunding spreads the risk of the riskiest part of the creative process across many people.  Put another way, no one relative needed to give Jackie the $7,000 she needs to produce her first CD’s — each person can take a little piece of the risk.  “Professionals” in the business like promoters, and record labels can “see” the track record — lowering their risk.

I have pointed out before that the collective absorption of risk creates tremendous opportunity for innovation.  I believe that crowdfunding of creative work can unleash the creativity of millions while lowering the risk of things new.  Isn’t that at least as inspiring as a nine year old belting out a melancholy tune?

If you liked this post you might find the following of interest:

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Wired magazine recently announced on its cover that the Web is Dead.  I confess I really like the magazine  despite some of the hyperbolic rants that Chris Anderson, Wired’s editor creates like his book “Free” — which is completely indefensible from an intellectual or factual standpoint.  In this case, I think the magazine is “right” — more and more digital traffic is going non-web mechanism but rather  in peer to peer activities like Twitter, or Netflix’s movie streaming, or listening to Pandora radio.  We are less and less  interacting with the “traditional” web.  Anderson and co-author Michael Wolff note that Marc Andreessen famously said that applications would be open, free and out of control — and here we are.

But how radical is this?  I believe it is just another turn of what I call the modularity cycle.  Modularity cycles tend to come from two sources.  Either, you have an innovator who comes up with a complete design — the way Edison and Westinghouse did for their electrical infrastructures.  This type of systemic innovation creates an entire value chain and business model.  Alexander Graham Bell did the same thing with the telephone.  Over time, these “systems” become more open and each module of value from the phone to the phone line, become fiercely competitive.  Big, successful systemic innovations create entire industry clusters — as Swift did for meat, Sears for retailing, and DuPont in chemicals.

I don’t see many entirely new business systems occurring in the digital world right now.  (You could argue that Google and Apple are close.)  I believe this lack of systemic innovation is due to the fact that too many parts of the infrastructure — especially access to bandwidth — are so heavily regulated, making it difficult for new business models to completely arise.  For example, if there were free access to a chunk of spectrum on a national basis, it would be possible for Ford or GM to launch an entirely peer to peer telecommunications infrastructure — with their cars becoming transceiving stations.  Car use goes in the same density as telecommunications demand, so it would give rise to bandwidth in a pattern shaped like the demand for the bits.  Given that many households spend around as much on entertainment and communications as they do on a car payment, one could imagine these companies finding entirely new profit pools.  But, given the regulatory infrastructure such a radical, systemic, innovation is unlikely in the new world.

The other way for the modularity cycle to begin is for a very simple application or product to become popular and more and more functionality can be layered on top.  For example, Twitter is starting to build its own applications to compete with more open platforms.  Today, they released their own application for the iPad and iPhone which will compete with the likes of Tweetdeck and Twitteriffic.  I believe Twitter will try to continue to incorporate more and more functionality in it’s “base” product.

So, the observation of the folks at Wired is simply noting that the sun is going down, before it is to rise again.  Modularity versus systemic innovation is an old and well documented story.  (It is also true that publications are often in the business to hype variance, not seek truth — so, all cycles are turned into impending trends to grab attention.)

For businesses, one important thing is to make sure that you can sample functionality and integrate new things on top of your “systems”.

You need to be able to enable your internal applications with existing, external applications as they arise from the modularity cycle.  Here are three thoughts:

1. Can you easily grab your employees information from their public pages on Linked-In?  Why not, it will save you time and money and connect them more easily to customers and recruits.
2. Can you map your customers onto a Google map, along with their revenue and growth?  Why not?  Wouldn’t you like to be able to “see” your demand?
3. Can you get access to all and any information about your brand and your customer’s brand’s easily — a brand radar if you will?  If not, why not?

Wired’s Anderson is right about one thing, you do need to be able to access this new ecosystem of modules and I’d add, you should understand the emerging systemic innovations too!

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I’m coming to believe every good is a convenience good.  A recent New York Times article reported that Nordstrom has integrated their in-store inventory with their online supply, meaning that anyone can get access to the entire inventory from any “location” — a physical store or online.  They also report that Nordstrom’s management believes that this “innovation” has helped change their same store sales from a “negative growth” (don’t you love that term!) of 11.9% to a positive growth of 9%.

The brilliance of this strategy is that it maximizes the most precious thing in any business — the yield on a customer that wants to buy something, now!  The famous maxim by Peter Drucker was, “The purpose of business is to create and serve a customer.”  So many businesses have become so operationally complex — especially in retail, that there are many barriers for a customer who wants to spend money.  Nordstrom, fortunately, was willing to spend the two years necessary to integrate all their inventory into one information pool — and thereby allows not only better customer service, but fewer mark downs and sale items.

Rightfully, the article points out how few companies have pulled this off.  But I will say I saw a similar result years ago.  Back in 1998-1999 I was working with W.W. Grainger the $7B industrial parts distributor, and then CEO Dick Keyser.  (By the way, Grainger’s stock price has tripled over the past decade while paying a regular dividend.)  Dick wanted to completely integrate the physical and the informational.  He was early in the market with Grainger.com, and was willing to make the significant investment to integrate all his inventory across retail stores, over 15 distribution plants, across a magnificently complex product line.  Grainger carries over 250,000 different products!  But Dick wanted any of their thousands of customer service or sales people to be able to check the entire inventory of the company and to be able to commit the actual unit — maybe it was the last water cooler available to replace a broken one in the local high school gym.  Not only does their system allow for complete visibility and commitment of the inventory of the entire company, but it even allows the customer to say if they want it shipped, if they will pick it up, or if they want it transferred to a closer store to allow for pick up.  Now that’s inventory control.

Dick was very clear on why he wanted to do this: Grainger’s core value proposition is convenience, and if they did not have availability the complexity of their business would dampen their economics.  But, if they could break the back of that complexity — by having one inventory then they could deliver better service and capture differentiated demand that was willing to pay a premium for service.

I think this lesson is generalizable.  All retail companies, and to an increasing extent business to business companies must have complete availability of all their products and services wherever, however, and whenever the customer comes to them.  Demand is a terrible thing to waste.

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If you are the type of person who likes to think about where things might be going I’d suggest you start watching the evolving competitive battle between Facebook and Google.  Both firms want to know who you are and whom you connect to, e.g. your “social graph”.   To date, Google knows a ton about what you search for, but only Facebook, LinkedIn or another social network knows your social graph.

As most people know, the value of Google is that their software crawls the web and uses its page rank algorithm to generate a giant “influence graph”, and thereby they serve up the most influential sites that match your search query, along with ads.  The social graph starts from a very different place.  It begins with you as a real human being – not just an individual searching for stuff – and because Facebook knows not only who you are, but whom you know, how often you “talk” with them, and what you chat about, Facebook has the potential to start mining this data for many commercially useful things.

In 1984 as a doctoral student my colleagues and I performed an extensive analysis of social graphs within three large organizations and from that experience I know that any firm which has a clear articulation of the social graph of a group can make an informed guess at who is the leader, who has power, who is listened to, and who is isolated.  Back then we performed these social graph analyses on itty-bitty personal computers with simple academic software.  Facebook and Google are building some of the world’s most powerful computer systems for their own use and I’d bet they will be able to easily show:

• What groups form around which subjects and why (something any media company, or politician would want to know);
• Which individuals are the most influential on any product or service decision in social group (something any marketer would desire);
• Whose star is rising and who’s falling (something a placement firm would like to understand).

To date, Google’s efforts in social media have been marginal at best.  Its Buzz service is not even close to Facebook’s popularity, and Orkut the social network they bought is popular in Brazil, but not strong elsewhere.  Yet, Google is undaunted and they recently invested an undisclosed sum (reported to be between $100-200,000,000) in the very popular social game company Zynga.  The Zynga game network, which includes Farmville and Mafia Wars, is visited by over 200,000,000 people a day within Facebook.  By investing in Zynga, Google might have a chance to get at the social graph – because the games show the connections among people.  Zynga is ready to create games outside of Facebook and Google may use Zynga’s games as an end run to get to the social graph.

Even if you are not interested in the competitive battle for the world’s attention, you should be asking yourself is your firm using the social data that is available to you?  For example, if Harvard Business Review wanted to, you could add the LinkedIn widget I have on this site which shows you all the people you already know in LinkedIn who are working at our firm Diamond.  Imagine how you could use that at your firm.  Any time a person “comes” to your web site, and if you encourage your employees to add their names to LinkedIn, the visiting person not only sees your content, but they find out if they already connected to people within your organization.  This social functionality can be very helpful for making useful connections.  This is just one simple application, there are many more possible.

We all know that relationships are vitally important and my question is, how well is your firm to take advantage of this new, social world?

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