While business was once all about keeping one step ahead of your ...

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• Publié par: igahakig
• Nombre de lectures: 218
• Langue: Français
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While business was once all about keeping one step ahead of your rivals, in today’s socially networked society, working together can lead to greater success. Colin Brown re p o rts ant to know how to succeed today in business without really trying? Forget about Old Boy networks and climbing the corporate ladder by whatever Machiavellian Wmeans necessary. Try instead tapping into the kindness of strangers and being upfront about your weaknesses. It certainly worked for Henk van Ess, a Dutchman who stumbled upon a thriving global sideline business by accident. Annoyed at how his beloved smartphone kept losing its charge, the investigative reporter-turned- technology expert posted a general plea on LinkedIn, the social network for the business community. “Who brings me the smallest rechargeable battery for the iPhone 3G without silly cases?” asked van Ess on a Friday night of his 500-plus online connections. Within 24 hours of that all-points bulletin, van Ess was being directed towards a Chinese manufacturer that works closely with NASDAQ-listed China BAK Battery. And so began a planetary chain reaction in July 2008: China BAK teamed up with the manufacturer to spec up a snap-on battery booster; a San Francisco artist designed the logo; a Dutch student came up with the box; a blogger from Engadget made a commercial; a New York video artist fashioned six other adverts; and a German supplied the music. Van Ess himself agreed to moonlight as the worldwide distributor for what became 3G Juice, presiding over a global backroom operation from his offi ce in Amersfoort, central Netherlands – even while keeping up his day-job training professionals to use IT. The resulting enterprise has seen rocketing sales through its Amazon storefront and is now expanding into new product areas. 52_CS4_SixDegreesFINAL.indd 2 15/04/2010 12:40 SIX DEGREES OF COLLABORATIONCOVER STORY “I can’t take credit for this” says van Ess. Flickr and Digg are only the most visible “All those strangers, professionals, did it examples of this barter mentality. for free. I was fl abbergasted that people There is no one rigid philosophy or who I never met, helped. Like me, they management practice that is driving this hated the battery life of the iPhone.” shift, but rather a spectrum of changing Propelled by the advent of online attitudes, techniques and tools that search and networking applications, good combine to promote sharing, aggregation, ol’ offi ce scheming and corporate secrecy peer group coordination and social has been stabbed in the back by this new cooperation. Together, they amount to one wave of volunteerism and transparency. giant “reset” button for business. “This is a great time to start a new That the internet is largely responsible business if you know how to harvest social is not coincidental. In his book, Weaving This is a great time media,” says van Ess. “I call it Product the Web, the web’s founding father Sir 2.0 – although the term 2.0 is a little Tim Berners-Lee says his objective was to start a business worn-out. Try to develop your product to make it easier for people to collaborate with your customers and engineers and by combining knowledge. Well, mission if you know do this openly. Find what people want in accomplished. Today, people and fi rms are Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn; reaching out to one another in ways that how to harvest fi nd the engineers and marketers too in would have been unfathomable even to social media.” He also urges the disclosure Berners-Lee when he proposed his “global social media of any product failings in an open-book hypertext project” in 1989. In doing so, policy that ought to give Toyota pause; in a looming marketplace for connectivity Henk van Ess, worldwide distributor, 3G Juice a world atwitter with instant feedback, tools has opened, one that is embracing there’s no room for soft-pedalling. media way beyond just text messages. Steering an enlightened path between “Collaboration is a $34bn [€25bn] create a central nervous system, keep staff outright capitalism and downright market today, enabled by technologies members looped in and enhance their communism, a new C-word has emerged which have video at its heart,” says institutional memory. as the way forward for business: Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Unsurprisingly, others are eyeing Collaboration. In today’s hyper-socialised emerging technologies at Cisco Systems. this same mother lode. Among them economy, it’s not who you know that Once the world’s largest company in is Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of really counts, but who you don’t. terms of market valuation, Cisco is now Salesforce.com, the €7.1bn San Francisco Latching onto this open-sourced amassing a portfolio of videoconferencing fi rm best known for selling on-demand paradigm, the priority for many CEOs platforms, wikis, document management business software applications. Benioff today is to break down the barriers that and team workspaces. sees collaboration software as the next stand between them and their employees, Already, estimates Irwin Lazar, vice frontier, “the most exciting revolution their customers, their partners, their president of communications and in computing, ever” that will serve as a vendors – even their rivals. National collaboration research for Nemertes catalyst for a productivity boom unlike boundaries are being bridged, corporate Research Group, approximately 40% of anything seen before. walls breached, expertise shared. US fi rms are deploying or planning to Responding to an email within 45 When he’s not looking to take a bite deploy a social computing platform to seconds of it reaching his BlackBerry out of Apple, Google chief Eric Schmidt’s prevailing mantra is “collaborate or perish.” Similarly, conglomerates such as IBM and Cisco have got collectivist religion and are bent on replacing the top- down managerial model of benevolent dictatorships and proprietary ownership with fl atter hierarchies and reciprocal relationships. They know that no single industry, company or individual has a monopoly on useful ideas. Failure to adopt this new collaborative mantle also leaves dyed-in-the- wool companies vulnerable to agile entrepreneurs who now have all the communication, technology and information at their disposal to become global competitors. And if such weapons of mass disruption are still not enough to assail entrenched market strongholds, Google’s mantra of “collaborate or perish” there’s always the nuclear option: offering may have helped it to products and services for free. Wikipedia, its leading position Craigslist, Yelp, Loopt, Delicious, YouTube, MAY 2010 I CNBC BUSINESS 53 52_CS4_SixDegreesFINAL.indd 3 15/04/2010 12:40– proof of just how real-time business 100 countries. US electronic retailer communications has become – Benioff Best Buy has created an in-house wiki draws a distinction between his own to discover insights into competition and ambitions and those who have failed 1 popular trends, while extreme off -site to grasp the transformational potential brainstorming with employees has also of social media. He says existing TAP YOUR led the company to form a web design enterprise collaboration platforms such as consultancy for small businesses. Microsoft’s SharePoint and IBM’s Lotus OWN STAFF Such initiatives are designed to foster Notes are so yesterday. If Facebook were a country, in-house incubators of creativity and “We need a new generation of its population would rank third largest after to break down the corporate silos that enterprise collaboration. Lotus Notes is China and India. Its exponential growth, and can lead to wasteful duplication and the so old it was conceived before [Facebook that of LinkedIn and other social networks, hoarding of valuable tidbits. Left to their founder] Mark Zuckerberg was. That’s is testament to the multiplier eff ect of own devices, knowledge workers fritter why we are working on Salesforce human networking. Th ey also serve as daily away up to 10 hours every week hunting Chatter, the Facebook for the enterprise.” reminders that chief executives know more for information through Google and other In an open letter to the tech community about their social media “friends” than they sources, according to market intelligence in the US on 10 March, Benioff said he do about most of their own staff . thought Facebook and Twitter one of the Which is why employers have started most productive ways to start his day. their own private collaboration spaces. Using these internet-enabled networks Danone, the French food group, has of friends and followers, he has tested forged invitation-only discussion groups new ad campaigns, elicited customer to unite its 90,000 employees across responses, promoted his book to a large audience, and even named a new product – all before sitting down for breakfast. Microblogging has By drawing a generational battle-line between the tech giants of the desktop era fewer barriers: it’s and the cloud- based upstarts, easier, quicker, Benioff is pointing out the attitudinal more flexible divides evident in global business as a whole. The following pages will highlight six ways that Marc Benioff , chairman and CEO, collaboration is Salesforce.comhelping executives prosper in the fl attening world economy. All of these initiatives are designed to create more of a two-way street in business dealings. While some are still rooted in the traditional notion of companies that fl ex up or down in size according to market conditions, others foresee a more free-fl oating vision of commerce, one that is increasingly dictated by a shape-shifting universe of freelance operatives who coalesce around single projects, disband and then reform for the next. Their umbilical chords are not attached to the corpo