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IBM London's social business briefing has got 'clue'

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I've long been an admirer of IBM's experiments in the use of social software in the enterprise and so great to meet up with them at London's Royal Exchange at their soon to be monthly Social Business Briefing, organised by Rooven Pakiri and soon to be rebranded as Wicked Wednesdays.  

The format is delightfully social creating an environment in which a conversation can take place rather than a traditional 'we speak, you listen' PowerPoint fest.  It's centred around asking some simple questions on which experts give their view and then opened up to the audience for debate. Cluetrain: Markets are conversations, right?

Voltaire said "Judge others by their questions rather than by their answers".  And here they are.

IBM Social Business Briefing Feb 8th, 2012

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Big thank you to IBM's Colin Chesterman for hosting us at their outstanding offices at The Royal Exchange and 'the experts' for sharing their ideas, thoughts and insights.  Dale Roberts, Mike Morrison, William McInnes, Stuart McIntyre, and Rooven Pakiri.

Can't wait for the next gig - Milan maybe?

 

The definition of a social business?

In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon.A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a "false karass," a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done."

No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

 

CEOs suffer from social paralysis

Thomas Power's excellent video on why the boards of companies are struggling to understand the importance of social media both inside and outside the company.

 

Customer manifesto for social business?

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so." I'm not entirely sure of the source of ths quote but it's apparently Ghandi.

How many brands, companies, government departments actually give you the feeling that this is what they stand for, and this is how they behave?

Could a culture like this lead to a truly social business?

The future of brands?

Related articles

• What's On The Horizon For Social Business? (darmano.typepad.com)

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