Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business August 11, 2010
Posted by McGraw-Hill Education (Asia) in Highlights, Management & Organization.Tags: accessible technology, Amazon, business solutions, cloud computing, cloud-based collaboration, Creative, Employees, Empowered, Energize Your Customers, Facebook, Harvard Business Press, heap, HEROes, innovative new solutions, Internet services, iPhones, IT, Josh Bernoff, lead, Leadership, Managers, online, problem-solvers, resourceful, solutions, Technographics segmentation, technologies, Ted Schadler, Transform Your Business, Unleash Your Employees, Web information, witter, YouTube
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Empowered
Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business
Authors: Bernoff, Josh Schadler, Ted
ISBN-13: 9781422155639
ISBN-10: 1422155633
©2010 | 1st Edition | 244 pages , Hardcover
Pub Date: September 2010
Price: US$ 27.95
Josh Bernoff @ Twitter | Ted Schadler @ Twitter | Facebook | Learn More
Is Your Company EMPOWERED for Success?
You know it’s happening within your organization. Your people, armed with cheap, accessible technology, are connecting with customers and building innovative new solutions. But who are these creative problem-solvers? How can you be one? And just as important how can you lead them?
We call them HEROes: highly empowered and resourceful operatives. Your company needs them because in the age of Twitter, iPhones, Facebook, YouTube, and an ever-evolving torrent of Web information, your customers now step up to the counter armed with more data and access than ever before, and in many cases, your company is overmatched.
In Empowered, Forrester’s Josh Bernoff coauthor of the pioneering book Groundswell and Ted Schadler explain how to transform your company by unleashing the mighty force of these HEROes. Like John Bernier and Ben Hedrington at Best Buy, who built an army of 2,500 tweeting employees to reach out to customers online. Or Ross Inglis, who tapped into Internet computing resources to open an entirely new customer channel for Thomson Reuters. Or John Stadick, who equipped 600 sales staff with iPhones and boosted profits at his construction rental company.
The truth is, one in three of your information workers already use easily accessible technologies that your company does not sanction. Empowered gives you a prescription for embracing this covert innovation. At the heart of a HERO-powered business is a new pact between these critical employees, company managers, and the IT department: HEROes build new solutions to meet customer needs, management sets clear rules while encouraging more experimentation, and IT expands its role to both support and secure these business solutions.
About the Author
Josh Bernoff is senior vice president, idea development at Forrester Research and is responsible for identifying, developing, and promoting the company’s most influential and forward-looking ideas.
Josh is the coauthor of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008), a BusinessWeek bestseller that has sold close to 80,000 copies to date. Abbey Klaasen of Advertising Age picked it as “the best book ever written on marketing and media,” and Amazon’s editors put it in their top 10 business books of 2008. In the same year, the Society for New Communications Research picked Josh and his Groundswell coauthor Charlene Li as “visionaries of the year.”
Josh has been a Forrester analyst for 14 years. He created the Technographics segmentation, a data format integral to all of Forrester’s consumer research. Josh is also known for 10 years of analysis of the television industry. Josh’s research has been featured on 60 Minutes. His research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently in publications and media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. He writes a column for Marketing News, a publication of the American Marketing Association, and blogs for Forrester and Advertising Age.
Ted Schadler is one Forrester Research’s most innovative and wide-ranging contributors. With 21 years of experience in the software industry, Ted advises clients in a wide variety of industries on collaboration tools and practices. Ted’s current research objective is to help clients understand the impact of emerging technologies on information workers. His work includes research on real-time collaboration tools, the economics of cloud-based collaboration, and the effect of mobile devices on enterprise collaboration. Ted launched Workplace Technographics, a unique approach to understanding what information workers need from technology and Internet services. Ted has five years of experience conducting quantitative studies of consumers and companies in 14 countries, with more than 1 million completed surveys. These studies include work on segmentation development, market sizing, behavioral and attitudinal analysis, and persona creation.
“Empowered delivers insight into one of the most underused opportunities for major marketers — tapping the army of employees and brand fans who put personal faces on corporate giants. As in Groundswell, Empowered serves up practical and tactical advice for marking it happen, placing it in the all-too-rare category of business books that don’t just tell you what to do also offer a framework for how to do it.” – ABBEY KLAASEN, Executive Editor, Advertising Age
“When Josh talks, big companies listen. Let Josh and Ted show you what more and more companies are figuring out the hard way: the world has changed, forever.” – SETH GODIN, Author, Linchpin
“For years, business books have been telling marketers to empower customers through digital channels. Empowered is even more relevant given today’s realities. It gives us the tools to align our marketing strategy with the expectations of our already-empowered customers.” – GEORGES-EDOUARD DIAS, Senior Vice President, Digital Business, L’Oreal
“Our personal and business worlds have changed — and Empowered is the blueprint for digital immigrants and natives to successfully participate.” – STEPHEN GILLETT, Chief Information official, General Manager of Digital Ventures, Starbucks Coffee Company
“Customers today insist on innovation. Recognizing this reality, organizations in the twenty-first century must engage and energize creative employees to establish sustainable differentiation and drive results. In this timely book, Bernoff and Schadler provide pratical thinking based on dozens of case studies and offer insight on how best to unleash the creative forces within your company.” – SHAYGAN KHERADPIR, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Verizon
Book Review
- getAbstract – To read, please click HERE
Articles by by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler
- BtoB Online, September 13: Four Social Tech Tips for b2b professional. To read, please click HERE
- Harvard Business Review, The Magazine, July-August Edition: Empowered. To read, please click HERE
- ZDNet June 23, 2010: Empowered customers need, empowered employees need, empowered IT. To read, please click HERE
- Ted Schadler’s Blog: Empowered Customers Need Empowered Employees Need Empowered IT. To read , please click HERE
Titles by Josh Bernoff (with Charlene Li)
- 9781422125007 Groundswell
- 9781422129807 Marketing in the Groundswell
Brian Solis talks with author Josh Bernoff about his upcoming novel, Empowered
Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution: How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Can’t Afford to Be Left Behind April 29, 2010
Posted by McGraw-Hill Education (Asia) in Highlights, Strategy.Tags: access, accessing, Affero General Public License, Amazon, application, applications, architecture, AT&T, autonomic, azure services, book, Business, capex, capital expenditure, certification, client, client-server, cloud computing, cluster, community cloud, compliance, contract, distributed, ECP, EGEE, Elastic Computing Platform, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, Enomaly, entry, expenditure, Facebook, FISMA, Forrester, Free Software Foundation, GoGrid, Google, Gov Cloud, GPLv3, grid, Guide, HIPAA, hourly, How-to, HP, hybrid cloud, IBM, Infrastructure, Intel, Internet, IT, laptop, law, legal, manager, managing, metering, Microsoft, monthly, Netsuite, network, OGF, Open Cirrus, Open Cloud Computing Interface, open source, open standards, Oracle, parallel, partner, partnering, pay, payments, platform, prices, privacy, private cloud, program, programming, public cloud, Rackspace, reliability, reliable, remote computing, return on investment, RightScale, ROI, Salesforce, Salesforce.com, SAS, scalable, Security, ServePath, server, service, software, SOX, storage, subscription, sustainability, the cloud, time share, time sharing, unix, utility, virtualization, virtualized, VPN, web, weekly, Yahoo
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Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution
How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Can’t Afford to Be Left Behind
Author: Babcock, Charles
ISBN-13: 978-0-07-174075-3
ISBN-10: 0071740759
©2010 | 1st Edition | 272 pages , Hardcover
Pub Date: May 2010
Price: US$ 27.95
Book Excerpt | Book Preview | Interview | Learn More
Why? Cloud computing is a hot topic both in the national business media as well as with major corporations.
- November 2009, Reuters ran an article on IBM’s recently-launched cloud computing service.
- November 16, 2009, Investor’s Business Daily wrote about how Microsoft’s cloud era is truly taking flight.
- And CNN.com recently produced this helpful video and article: “A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’”: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/04/cloud.computing.hunt/index.html
With Google, Salesforce, and Amazon being the early leaders of the cloud computing trend, business leaders will no doubt need a book as a guide to the management strategies needed to launch their own clouds.
Now that we have your attention…….
About the Book
There’s a great deal of buzz about cloud computing in the ranks of business management. But so far, the discussion has focused on the technology behind it. Yes, technical understanding is needed to explain cloud computing, but its true import can’t be described in terms of technology. It requires a strategic business interpretation. And for business leaders, to fail to understand cloud computing is to risk being left behind in the next round of business computing and the resulting business evolution.
If you think the Internet had a major impact on business, it will pale beside the long term effects of the cloud. The cloud unleashes changes already spawned by the Internet that were creeping forward. It accelerates them, rewards fast moving organizations and punishes slow ones, breaks down traditional hierarchies while building up ad hoc teams. It potentially turns over immense computing power to employees of any rank to provision themselves with the computing power they think they need. Some will use that power foolishly, and be penalized; others will use it with discipline and creativity — in ways their bosses never imagined — and advance. The stakes for all are high.
Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution refocuses the discussion of cloud computing in terms of business strategy. For the business world, this is a force of democratization: it makes large scale, high speed, highly reliable systems available for business analysts, business intelligence experts, line of business managers and researchers who only need to pay for short term use. There’s no need to apply to IT to build out the capacity in the data center. In some cases, the business user activates a major resource with the swipe of a credit card.
The technology is not new — virtualization, loosely coupled systems, Internet networking — have been around for years, but what businesses can do with the combination is new. The convergence is already well underway, but your firm’s senior management has only a hazy notion of it taking place. This book arms them with the critical understanding of how the cloud is going to change how we do business. It will:
- Educate top business management on cloud benefits
- Cultivate end user participation in the cloud
- Reveal how to become an example of leadership on cloud issues
- Help leaders formulate the cloud strategy
- Show businesses how to thrive as cloud computing becomes standard
Book Review
- Book review on WilfridWong.com. To read, please click HERE
- getAbstract.com
About the Author
Charles Babcock (San Francisco, CA) has been reporting on the major trends in computing for the past 20 years. He currently serves as editor-at-large at InformationWeek, covering the business application of Web services, virtualization, cloud computing and other topics of interest as they come up. He writes major features and cover stories for InformationWeek, daily stories for its Web site, http://www.informationweek.com, and blog regularly on related topics. He has also been integral in their transtition to the web. He is the former Software Editor and Technical Editor of Computerworld and editor-in-chief of Digital News.
He has been the winner of $400 William Randolph Hearst journalism scholarships for two years in a row in a national competition (third place, investigative reporting; fourth, editorial writing). He was also part of a team of three at InteractiveWeek that won the Jesse Neal award for business writing for an in-depth look at a failed effort to revamp computing systems at McDonalds Corp.
Babcock gives talks at user groups of software companies. I moderate panels or sit on panels at shows, such as the Open Source Business Conference. He organizes, hosts and speaks at InformationWeek-organized Webinars on virtualization and cloud computing. Over the course of a year, he speaks to 800-1,200 people in various settings. He also appears in a regular show of video recorded interviews on Silicon Valley topics, called ValleyView, aired on the InformationWeek Web site.
8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT March 11, 2010
Posted by McGraw-Hill Education (Asia) in Highlights, Management & Organization.Tags: Apple, Business Smart, Deborah Tannen, Fortune Global 200 clients, Fraught, Frustrations, Human Resource, Incentives, Information Technology, Interpersonal Communication, IT, IT Departments, IT Professionals, Leadership Agenda, Mars, Men Vs Women, Microsoft, Operational managers, Paradox, Partnership, Personality, Perspective, Repetoire, Secret Code, Sony and Time Warner, Supply chain management, Susan Cramm, Things we hate about IT, Toyota, venus
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8 Things We Hate About IT
How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT
Author: Cramm, Susan
ISBN-13: 978-1-4221316-4
ISBN-10: 1422131661
©2010 | 1st Edition | 200 pages , Softcover
Pub Date: March 2010
Price: US$ 16.95
Book Preview
Crack the secret code of how IT departments really work and what makes IT professionals tick.
Why can’t operational managers ever get what they really want from IT? Why is the relationship so fraught with frustration from all parties? IT managers and business leaders simply don’t understand each other, the way they think, the pressures they face and the goals they are trying to achieve. Enter Susan Cramm, the prospective Deborah Tannen of the Business-IT relationship.
Personality-wise, if men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then the IT people are from Microsoft and their business partners are from Apple. In spite of great effort to become more business-smart, line and IT managers have very different backgrounds and experiences which make it difficult to communicate what they do and why and how they do it. Different pressures and incentives further increase the difficulty of forming positive IT-business relationships. While line managers need to ‘get ‘er done now’ to support the needs of their function or units (or pay the price in terms of near term business results and bonuses), IT managers need to ‘get ‘er done right’ to support the longer term needs of the enterprise (or pay the price in terms of fragmented, fragile systems.)
The key to reconciling these and other differences is to figure out how to manage the paradox. If you want to get what you want from IT, you need to shift your perspective and look through the eyes of your IT partners. Doing so will allow you to develop a single version of ‘truth’ and give you the insight necessary to change the relationship for the better.
Similarly, this book will help dispel the notion that managers can ‘hand off’ their IT responsibility to the IT organization and will provide the tools to incorporate the management of IT into their daily leadership agenda and repertoire. Business leaders should assume accountability for IT, much as they have assumed accountability for the management of the financial and human resource asset and build the necessary capabilities into their organization.
The core ideas in this book also promise to have applicability to managing other relationships between business units and specialized service providers. Think supply-chain management, or better yet, graphic design.
About the Author
Susan Cramm is the founder and president of Valuedance. Susan Cramm is a recognized industry expert on information technology leadership. She has helped pioneer the field of IT leadership coaching through her passion and gifts for developing others, as well as her keen insights regarding IT leadership, which are derived from extensive research and years serving in executive level positions. She has worked with executives from a number of Fortune Global 200 clients, including Toyota, Sony and Time Warner. Susan’s experience makes a difference and her clients describe her as ‘insightful’, ‘motivational’, ‘practical’, ‘tough’, ‘committed’ and ‘invaluable’. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and, since 2000, has authored the monthly “Executive Coach” column for CIO magazine.
Susan is the former CFO and executive vice president at Chevy’s Mexican Restaurants. She joined Chevy’s in 1994 to assist in the development of a nationwide Mexican ‘cantina style’ restaurant concept and assumed responsibility for finance, business strategy, restaurant development, franchising and legal functions. Prior to Chevy’s, Cramm worked with the Taco Bell Corporation and held the positions of CIO and vice president of the Information Technology Group and Senior Director for Financial and Strategic Planning.
Susan received her master’s degree in management from Northwestern University, specializing in finance, marketing and quantitative methods and her BA from University California, San Diego, summa cum laude, specializing in management and computer science.
Tables of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Service or Control
Chapter 2: Results or Relationships
Chapter 3: Tactics or Strategy
Chapter 4: Expense or Investment
Chapter 5: Quick or Quality
Chapter 6: Customization or Standardization
Chapter 7: Innovation or Bureaucracy
Chapter 8: Great or Good
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