How social technologies are extending the organization - McKinsey Quarterly - High Tech - Strategy & Analysis Companies are improving their mastery of social technologies, using them to enhance operations and exploit new market opportunities—key findings of our fifth annual survey on these tools and technologies, in which we asked more than 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy them and the benefits they confer. When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share, respondents say, confirming last year’s survey results. But this is a very dynamic environment, where the gains from using social technologies sometimes do not persist, perhaps because it takes so much effort to achieve them at scale. Usage at scale and continued benefits Social technologies as a group have reached critical scale at the organizations represented in our survey. The performance edge of networked enterprises Networked organizations: Not a steady state
Kiira, The Ugandan Electric Car That Could Africa can claim a simple formula for its recent economic success: falling costs, a rising middle class and tenacious faith in its own future. Uganda, one of the continent’s poorer countries, has little to show for that success, except one thing: a new, homegrown electric car. The plug-in Kiira electric vehicle (EV) was designed, manufactured, and assembled in Uganda by students and faculty at Makerere University. The two-seater can maintain speeds of more than 60 mph and operate for about 4 to 5 hours before its lithium ion batteries need to be recharged. The bright green vehicle took its first official test run in November, inspiring government and university officials to proclaim it a symbol of Uganda’s ability to start solving its social and economic problems. For Paul Isaac Musasizi, the university engineering professor who oversaw the project, the experience of Kiira’s first test drive was nothing like the thousand of similar events that happen in the developed world each day.
Inside P&G's digital revolution - McKinsey Quarterly - Retail & Consumer Goods - Strategy & Analysis Robert McDonald is a CEO on a mission: to make Procter & Gamble the most technologically enabled business in the world. To get there, the 31-year company veteran and former US Army captain is overseeing the large-scale application of digital technology and advanced analytics across every aspect of P&G’s operations and activities—from the way the consumer goods giant creates molecules in its R&D labs to how it maintains relationships with retailers, manufactures products, builds brands, and interacts with customers. The prize: better innovation, higher productivity, lower costs, and the promise of faster growth. Podcast Inside P&G's digital revolution DownloadListen to more of the interview, including Robert McDonald’s views on radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking technology and the growing use of smartphones in developing markets. Real-time insights Our purpose at P&G is to touch and improve lives; everything we do is in that context. One way is through consumer feedback.
Local high-tech firms see big need for STEM jobs (with video) - Cecil Whig: Business The world's developed nations jostle for position at the starting line of a foot race. A gun pops, and the racers spring forward. China, India and Brazil hurl ahead, blind to anything but forward progress. Falling to the back is the United States. Once the early leader, the U.S. now lags behind and occasionally stops, winded and doubled-over, to watch its competitors' pumping arms and legs fade into the distance. That the U.S. is falling behind - particularly with regard to competitiveness in science, technology, engineering and mathematics - is becoming a reality difficult to ignore. The World Economic Forum currently ranks the United States 48th in quality of math and science education, and according to The Science Coalition, in 2009, 51 percent of U.S. For technology companies, the lack of STEM-savvy employees is an urgent problem. Three of the area's top tech companies - including Alliant Techsystems and W.L. "I can't imagine our needs going down," he said.
The Thought Leader Interview: Meg Wheatley With her first book, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (Berrett-Koehler, 1992), Margaret J. (Meg) Wheatley began developing a body of work around the links between organizational learning, innovative leadership, and such fields of thought as chaos theory, quantum physics, and neuroscience. Around the same time, she cofounded the Berkana Institute, a U.S. Then, starting in the mid-2000s and accelerating with the economic crisis of 2008, Wheatley noticed new levels of anxiety among her friends, clients, and business acquaintances. Wheatley responded by turning simultaneously inward and outward. Walk Out Walk On, coauthored with Deborah Frieze (a former co-president of the Berkana Institute), is subtitled A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now (Berrett-Koehler, 2011). S+B: Why is perseverance important right now?
Atul Gawande: Lowering Medical Costs By Providing Better Care hide captionAtul Gawande is a staff member of Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His books include Better and Complications. Fred Field Atul Gawande is a staff member of Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. One of the criticisms of the health care reform bill enacted last year is that it expanded coverage without doing enough to control rising health care costs. Gawande's piece in the current issue of the New Yorker about those who focus on patients with the highest medical costs is called "The Hot Spotters." One of the physicians he profiles, Jeff Brenner, is a family practitioner working in Camden, N.J. Brenner was operating under a hypothesis: He figured that the people who had the highest costs in the health care system were also getting the worst care. After three years, Brenner and his team appear to be having a major impact. That net savings, Gawande tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies, is absolutely "revolutionary."
Trust Me: Here's Why Brands Sell Trust, Subconsciously Let's say that not that long ago you came across a fascinating article. But when you later try to verify some of the facts, you just can't pinpoint exactly where you first read it. What you do recall is that the source was reliable and you trusted the message. There's more to it. Many studies demonstrate that trust, above all else, becomes a more salient feature in our life as we grow older. In a 2010 study conducted by Harvard professor Bharat Anand, and Alezander Rosinski, they examined how the power of ads are influenced by the magazine or newspaper they appear in. Which brings me back to my theory on how we store information according to our levels of trust. Everyone involved in the process was asked to send a text message to a central server every time they would think of a brand. We learned that when a person we trust makes a recommendation, we not only follow their advice, but we also convey the trust of the initial communication to others. I guess I've made my case.
Home | Commonwealth Connects Programme – Bridging the digital divide Average Is Over. What's Your Extra? - Bill Taylor by Bill Taylor | 9:05 AM December 19, 2011 I approach a book by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman with a mixture of wariness and anticipation. Wariness because Friedman’s books tend to go on for many pages longer than they need to, and many of those pages contain his trademark blend of Davos Man self-congratulation and cheesy metaphors. Yet I still have a sense of anticipation because in every one of Friedman’s books there are a handful of insights that are so clear, so sharp, so flat-out right that they frame how you look at the world going forward. That Used to Be Us, Friedman’s newest book (written with Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum) has at least one such observation — a principle so clearly true, and so crisply expressed, that it should become a mantra of sorts for leaders everywhere who want to build something great and do something important. Most organizations don’t stand for anything special, of course. Talk about positive word of mouth.
How To Charge Higher Prices And Thrive Harvey’s Hardware is a legend in my town of Needham, Mass. In business since 1953, Harvey’s sells what most people consider to be commodity items--nuts, bolts, lawnmowers, shovels, and so on. And yet, Harvey’s revenue per square foot is almost four times higher than the typical hardware store. This is shocking considering that even though they sell commodity products: Harvey’s never has the lowest prices. Harvey’s never runs a sale.Harvey’s never provides discounts or offers coupons. Why would people crowd into Harvey’s to buy something that they could get for less at Home Depot or another big box store? First proposed in the 1980s by Michael Lanning and Lynn Philips, benefit experiences are the sum of the specific and measurable events that happen in your customers' lives as a result of doing business with you. The concept of a benefit experience is something that few people talk about. Here is an example of a recent benefit experience that I enjoyed as a result of shopping at Harvey’s.
Interactive map of McKinsey's 5 years of studying the business use of social software. by johntodor Dec 8