Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business August 11, 2010

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.

Endorsement

“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

1. getAbstract – To read, please click HERE

Articles by by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler

1. BtoB Online, September 13: Four Social Tech Tips for b2b professional. To read, please click HERE
2. Harvard Business Review, The Magazine, July-August Edition: Empowered. To read, please click HERE
3. ZDNet June 23, 2010: Empowered customers need, empowered employees need, empowered IT. To read, please click HERE
4. Ted Schadler’s Blog: Empowered Customers Need Empowered Employees Need Empowered IT. To read , please click HERE
   
   

Titles by Josh Bernoff (with Charlene Li)

1. 9781422125007      Groundswell
2. 9781422129807      Marketing in the Groundswell
   
   

Brian Solis talks with author Josh Bernoff about his upcoming novel, Empowered

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