Business Insight Zone

A while back, I went on a binge of commenting on other blogs. This week I did it again. It’s a good exercise for at least three reasons:

1. It fosters dialogue, which is exactly what I want to promote here.
2. As a blogger, I get a kick out of choice comments — even in dissent — so I like to give that little gift anytime I can.
3. By appealing to friends, Twitter followers, etc. for their suggestions on what to comment about, I get exposed to many new blogs and many new thoughts.

Here, then, are some of the most interesting posts that I commented on this week. Whether you agree with my comments or not, I recommend reading the posts themselves.

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Adele McAlear at Marketing Monster: Yammer Wins TechCrunch 50 with Twitter-like Enterprise Service

Yammer is like Twitter, but intended to be used within the walls of a single company for communication and collaboration. Adele has a great write-up of the service, which could overcome Twitter’s biggest advantage. (I discussed that advantage in this post.) Here’s part of what I wrote in my comment:

[A]t a strategic level, Yammer has neatly side-stepped Twitter’s greatest advantage, which is its entrenchment in the lives of its users. In other words, no one wants to have to convince all their Twitter friends to migrate with them to some other service. But in the corporate setting, you *expect* to set up a new social graph limited to your workmates. Nifty.

One of my buddies has kicked off a Yammer group internal to Hoover’s, so I’ll tell you more about how it works after I’ve had a chance to play with it.

BONUS: read the comment thread in this post by Chris Brogan — and especially Damon Cortesi’s exchanges — for more thoughts on how Yammer might work (or might not be the best choice) within the enterprise IT environment.

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David Valentino at FG SQUARED: Corporate Evaluations of Social Media

David offers a sober-minded and straightforward account of how social media is adopted in enterprises, not by enthusiasts, but by the senior decision makers in IT and other departments. I said, in part:

I think that a lot of social-media devotees would nod their heads at this and say, “Okay, but what’s new about any of this?” But these early/avid adopters (I’m one of them) are like early radio enthusiasts, or the people who bought Altair computers in the mid-1970s: their passion is great, but social media won’t “grow up” until it percolates across the broader culture — and particularly the broader business culture.

This ties back into a point I’ve harped on before (more than once): like other truly groundbreaking media, the social media offer entirely new ways of doing certain things. But we can also look to the history of the other mainstream media (print, radio, television, etc.) to get an idea of how these new media may be adopted, and especially within traditionally go-srow corporate environments.

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Tom Raftery at Greenmonk: What are your top tips for helping RedMonk/GreenMonk become carbon neutral?

When you’re in the analyst business, you do a lot of air travel. So for all the other steps you take to attain carbon neutrality, you still run up against what seems like a carboniferous brick wall. In his post, Tom wrote, “I know that in my own case, my travel footprint will likely far exceed all my other activities and unfortunately, this is not travel which can be avoided.” I tried to (gently) chip away at this with my comment:

I know that your business is built on trust with & thorough understanding of clients, and on networking your way to new clients. But I would still challenge you to take an engineer’s approach to the problem, with targets to reduce the number of flights and the number of flight miles within a certain timeframe — e.g. by 10% of each over the next six months in comparison to the past six months.

This may, by the way, offer you a better chance to educate your clients: you reinforce the importance of bit-miles versus human-travel-miles by, for example, always charging the client for travel including offsets, and by charging extra fo physical trips taken above a certain threshold.

In terms of work philosophy, this may lead you to a sort of mega-batch-processing over the course of the year. That is, you each spend longer continuous periods working from your home bases, then longer, more intense periods traveling, with more client engagements per mile traveled. (In fact, that could give you another metric to ponder: hours of client/networking facetime per air-mile traveled. Seek to improve the ratio my meaningful amounts during each half-year.)

By no means do I think that this nut will be easy to crack. But for a green-minded company — and especially for a green consultancy like Greenmonk — I’ll bet that the effort will be worth it.

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Tom Peters: Spontaneous Discovery: F.A. Hayek, U.S. Grant, Herb Kelleher, and I

Tom uses this post to harp on one of his favorite ideas, which is to minimize the importance of systems thinking in favor of the philosophy of “Action! Now!” One of his heroes in this vein is Herb Kelleher, who built Southwest Airlines. I commented, in part:

Kelleher had enough “strategy” to get started when he had the napkin sketch of the triangular routes between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Supplement with the strategic idea that Southwest wouldn’t fly loss-making routes for the sake of “footprint.” Build everything around people giddy at the opportunity to work at such a fun place. And then just do things do things do things do things.

That “strategy” beats the heck out of many a 200-page document, with more devoid-of-substance bullet points than anyone could ever digest.

What I’m really getting at, now that I’ve had more time to digest, is that you need a simple set of “algorithms” — centered on relentless forward progress via trial-and-error action — that take the place of overly fancy strategies. It’s too easy for a strategy to be treated as an individual project, rather than as the fundamental operating system of the company. The success of Southwest, Google, Toyota, GE, Berkshire Hathaway, and other “algorithm” companies suggests that the algorithm approach is a better way to go.

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(Photo by art_es_anna.)

Category: Green & Clean, Management, Social media