Last week I took part in several events at Social Media Week London. It is an amazing event and kudos to Sam Michel and his team at Chinwag for helping make it happen.

I met loads of interesting people and had lots of interesting conversations but came away bemused by the amount of business there is doing something for people that I believe they should be doing for themselves. We have turned social media into a thing that can be bought and sold and are attempting to industrialise something that I believe is organic. Just turning it into a thing is problematic (thanks to Mark Foden for the word “thingification”) and I had a few rants about this throughout the week.

You can watch one below!

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1. At least thirty years of ingrained business culture that focusses on process rather than people and doesn’t have the language or concepts to handle relationships.
2. Senior people who will never get “it” but have the power to stop “it” happening.
3. People’s fear of disapproval if they say what they think.
4. Vendors who talk nonsense about unrealistic timescales and benefits and want to lock them into over-engineered solutions that keep IT departments happy but don’t change the world.
5. IT
6. IT

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Everyone talks about being ‘sustainable’ but what exactly does that mean when it comes to staff engagement?

Simple – treat your staff and people like valuable human beings – your social capital is important as society adjusts to a new generation of younger thinkers. These younger thinkers are in a position where they will soon work out that they don’t really need stability formerly know as “a real job”, they already know that they can provide value, that means they can live off the land . . . . er  . . . world that the baby-boomer built.

To be truly sustainable people will in some casesneed to wait for the dinosaurs of an archaic pre-baby-boomer industrial age to retire or die out.  The platform for sustainability is already around us – the baby boomers built it – the new generation knows exactly how to make sustainability work – they are building for tomorrow and doing right to others.

The secret rests in applying the “Golden Rule”.

Adding Value is starting to become another phrase that’s been hijacked by the bandwagon brigade. How should a business avoid being labeled as ‘oh another one’ when it starts to talk about its own adding value?

Value is possibly on of the most worn-out terms in the corporate buzz word book: Today much of which is accorded value is an fantasy (think financial markets – value is not solid – it’s all about leverage – it’s made up – the King dollar and Queen pound are naked so to speak).

Before the iPhone every phone handset maker spent over 15 years claiming to “add value” to their phones (no-one really noticed) – yet all they really ended up doing was creating a market for “upgrading” – value in this context simply defined a process of profiting from obsolescence dressed up as wanna-have-a-new-one “inspired upgrades”.  Joseph Schumpeter had a great term for innovation  – he called it “creative destruction”. Innovation in the mobile handset industry was a delusion and it added very little true value – in contrast the Telco’s have created a Thick ‘n Deep world of value – they got the whole world communicating – even in some of the remotest places in Africa and South America – they made the world a friendlier and more accessible place that’s what I call “Thick ‘n Deep” Value.  In contrast many Financial Advisors, Food producers and pharmaceutical companies claim they’re “adding value,” but mostly they’re just hyper-marketing – government and regulators tell us they are adding value – yet we fail to notice. If one fails to notice or one needs to analyse whether something is of true value – then the following assertion remains – it’s thin value.

The vast majority of companies today deliver superficial thin value. Thick ‘n Deep value is real, meaningful, and sustainable. It happens by making people authentically better off — not merely by adding more bells and whistles that your boss might like, but that cause customers to roll their eyes.

How to avoid the “oh another one” labeling, frankly that’s obviously easier said than done – I believe successful business needs to create not just thick value (a term coined byUmair Haque of Harvard Business School) but deep value as well.

“Thick ‘n Deep” Value is the key and can be tested by asking these questions.

1. Does it enrich the business?
2. Does it leave the people it serves sustainably and deeply enriched?
3. Does your customer trust you?
4. Does it make the world a better place.

Thin value is all about assertion. Now with “Thick ‘n Deep” Value you just know – deep down – you know that it’s good.

What about, those who think it’s just semantics? What about those who believe there is a thin line separating the two types of value? What about those who don’t know the difference?  There is an answer ‘out there’ to those questions as well . . . .  fire up your favourite browser – navigate to Wikipedia and search for the following word “extinction”.

We appear to be moving into the age of individuals wanting to make a difference. Why is this happening and is it something businesses should embrace or fear?

Why is this happening – those who equated human beings with industrial machines, those who applied depraved Cartesian reasoning to human capital and poisoned the very space they live in are why thing are changing! Those who misguidedly cite progress as the high road to some holy grail are soon to be buried and gone. The baby-boomers and their wonderful progeny Generation X and M, will embrace true capitalism one that embraces people, profit and planet.

Making a difference is the essence of  “Thick ‘n Deep” Value – today wise people take the triple bottom line (3BL) and embrace it. If I may quote my friend Vinay Gupta the inventor of the Hexayurt – he sums it all up beautifully in the following statement:

“Triple Bottom Line asks that businesses justify themselves in three ways: natural capital, social capital and financial capital, [these] are the terms [of reference] for the three “bottom lines. These three are often shorthanded as planet, people and profit.”

Consider this – Africa is home to 70% of the ‘bottom billion’.  It would be truly stupid to ignore 700million people, who amongst them are the potential producers of your food, and who become the affluent consumer countries and even venture capitalists of the future.  It is possible that in our lifetime that Asia and Africa will be providing the some of metaphoric First World with handouts.

Fear is probably not an issue – the relics; the greedy ‘old school thinkers’ of the pre-baby-boomer industrial age are almost extinct – they are old now – they will soon die off.

Many motivational speakers keep telling us Its all about attitude, or positive mental thinking, whilst the politicians say we need to keep spending to get ourselves out of the recession. is this enough /right?

Motivational speakers want you to succeed (which is a good thing) it’s in their DNA and they are right in my opinion – it is truly about attitude, without high self esteem and positive mental attitude society would be listening to politicians (whom I might add are pretty short on leadership and good ideas right now) who are reacting to spin and rhetoric dressed up as public opinion. Politicians today act only on short term events. Politics is about power – and power is all about what you can control.

That’s about to change – society is far more open today. Young people think and act – some may think it’s because they are precocious – perhaps? They do know what is good and they know what is special and they care about people – and they know what freedom looks and feels like because the upcoming world, demands freedom, as it demands air to breathe; and you know what freedom is all about don’t you? Freedom is about what you can unleash – freedom is about “Thick ‘n Deep” value for humanity!

The politician telling to spend your way out of the recession is acting out a party ideology in a bid to stay in control – which ultimately means they are not civil servants and guardians anymore are they?

My money is on the motivational speaker.

Many companies are pulling in their belts and cutting costs in order to survive. Others are thriving and growing even if they are in the same industry. In your opinion What could be the main reasons for this difference?

If they are pulling in belts and cutting costs (that’s what people are, aren’t they costs) then there is probably a cesspool of thin value festering. If you have to pull in your belt for more than 12 months remember you aren’t a slave – you should really go somewhere more exciting – maybe join those who are thriving. Anyone?

Imagine this cutting costs parable. A restaurant that that cuts it’s costs on a 12.95 chicken meal worries me – because instead of “Thick ‘n Deep” chicken value you are getting the thin and cheap version for the same price as the “Thick ‘n Deep”.

Those that are thriving – oh  – that’s easy they are delivering value, “Thick ‘n Deep” Value – you know . . . . the stuff that humanity needs.

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There’s something wrong with all of the names we use to describe the use of social web tools in business. They are wrong for various reasons whether Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business or whatever. At risk of adding another inappropriate name to the list I have been thinking that in many ways what we are really talking about is “literate business”. This is probably because I have been reading a lot about writing in preparation for writing my book – the idea of thinking through writing, getting a shitty first draft down and then critiquing it, refining ideas through the process of sharing them, etc..

It occurred to me that what is significant about the tools we are seeing creeping into the business world is not so much that they are social as that they are literary in nature. They require, at whatever level, people to observe the world around them, make sense of it, and convey that sense to others, mostly, through the written word. All three parts of this process are the essence of good literature and they are all relatively unfamiliar in the business world. Most people don’t pay much attention to what is going on around them, they don’t sit and think much about what it means, and they are very unlikely to take the time to sit down and write about it. This is what blogging or tweeting makes easier. It also makes it collective.

It is this possibility of businesses being collectively literate, in a way fundamentally different from the turgid, disconnected, process related documentation that we currently spend so much time, money and effort creating and storing. David Weinberger once said that through blogging we were “writing ourselves into existence” maybe this is what we are seeing happen in the world of work?

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I have always struggled with “B to E” or “B to B” or “B to C” and the way these phrases are bandied about almost aggressively by people wanting to show how businesslike and in the know they are. For a long time I had no idea what they were on about!*

I am currently writing a chapter for a book on what I have called staff advocacy. Cut out the middle men, let your staff talk directly online with your customers. They are anyway but have to pretend they are not or do so with only partial information. Why not accept this is happening and make a virtue of it. Imagine – real conversations between real staff and real customers!

I reckon E to C is the way to go ….

*They refer to communication between Business to Employee, Business to Business, and Business to Customer for those as unenlightened as I was

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Listening to endless presentations about business and technology as I do it becomes more and more obvious that the opportunity to capitalise on increased connectivity, and the need to reinvent our institutions, are entirely dependent on the quality of our relationships. Shame people are still squeamish about talking about this.

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I am more and more convinced that far from damaging business efficiency, as is often claimed by naysayers, becoming more social at work heals so much of what goes wrong.

How often are people de-motivated by a manager treating them as a number or a statistic on their spreadsheets rather than relating to them as a person? How many costly misunderstandings occur because those burdened by responsibility are more comfortable with broadcast than respectful listening? How many projects fail because of the dominance of a powerful individual at the expense of the social bonds of a group?

We have disparaged the “soft” social skills of relationship building as being un-businesslike in favour of a dispassionate coldness. Maybe we should think again.

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In the process of pulling together previous blog posts for a project I came across my first post about Twitter in November 2006:

Twitter

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This time from July 2006 and it’s a goodie even if I say so myself!

The Email Asshole

A friend of mine recently posted a new mail address to a large-ish list of his friends and acquaintances. In his post he wrote something which a number of us found funny and to which we “replied all” in the spirit of a little light hearted humour not doing anyone any real harm.

This then provoked a number of grumpy responses from people telling us how not to use “reply all” and asking to be removed from the list. The tone of these responses was that these people were somehow grown-ups who those of behaving childishly were distracting them from important things and that they held some sort of moral upper hand.

This is an attitude I encounter all of the time in talking to businesses. There are those who even react badly to the “social” in Social Computing. Mucking around is frowned upon and there is an assumption that “business like” behaviour is the most appropriate and the most effective.

However, in direct contrast, I am more convinced that this is one of the more insidious mindsets in the workplace and one that is significantly curtailing the effectiveness of business.

The collusion behind “we don’t do things like that around here” or “that is not the sort of thing we should be talking about in a work context” can be intimidatingly strong. And although it appears on the face of it to be a reasonable position to take when you think about it what are their motivations in saying these things? Is it really effective to curtail your conversations in the workplace to a very limited and closely controlled range of topics with which you are already familiar and comfortable? If you don’t get to find about people through their whimsicality, their passions and even their prejudices then how are you going to be able to establish enough trust to be able to work with them effectively? What are they so afraid of? Chaos? Anarchy?

In so many ways this coercive attempt to control others’ behaviour is more about maintaining power and control than it is to do with organisational effectiveness.

If the nutters with daft ideas, those who are prepared to banter and exchange their views and to “think different” get their way and make the status quo messy then maybe we would have to change and to change we would have to think and we don’t like doing that too much because we have been trained not to do that at work …..

If you get an e-mail from me that is pointless, unfunny or plain daft then rather than waste the time and energy it would take to try to change me why not just delete it and move on to the really, really important things I am sure you have to do!

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Walk into any business on a rainy day and for the most part, they’re empty. Everyone is relaxed. You get great service and lots of attention. No one seems to be really busy which seems to me like a perfect time to cold call. The owner is in. Business is slow. They don’t really have anything to do but talk to you. Chances are you’ll be the only sales person that walks in the door today. Why not?

This dawned on me early in my sales career. When you’re out there every day competing for the attention of a buyer or business owner, you look for ways to stand out. I realized that all my counterparts were in their little cubicles doing paperwork, making phone calls and setting appointments for tomorrow when it wasn’t going to be raining.

So, I grabbed an umbrella and hit the road. It was amazing. Very rarely did I walk into a business that I didn’t get to speak to a decision maker. I mean, think about it. I just completely set myself apart from everyone. I’m the one that will get out in the rain, get my feet wet and work a little harder for the business. This speaks volumes to someone you’re trying to do business with. Who wants to give their money to someone who only wants to work when everything is nice and sunny? Get it?

I went to a business networking meeting this morning and attendance was pretty bad. This is a weekly meeting that people pay to go to so they can get referrals to make more money. But it was raining. It was raining HARD. Apparently, that was enough to keep at least 50% of the regular attendees from venturing out. It just looked like another opportunity to me.

Do you know what a rainmaker is? Dictionary.com says a rainmaker is “One who is known for achieving excellent results in a profession or field, such as business or politics”. Is that you? What do you do when it rains? Are you one of those people who would have skipped the meeting? Do you sit in your office and try to get people on the phone? Are you doing your expense report? Stop.

Try it just once. You’ll be surprised at the results. Be a rainmaker. Next time it rains, put on your best suit. Give yourself a little pep talk, grab your umbrella and hit the streets. Take plenty of business cards and be ready. I bet you make a little money.

Michelle C. Ritter is a the owner of http://www.e-worc.com , a web design and sales consulting company where she works with many types of product and service based industries in developing sales and marketing plans and effective online programs. She specializes in cross-industry communication and teaches a series of seminars for MTI Business Solutions http://www.mobiletechwebsite.com that focus on teaching others to enjoy success in sales by learning how to speak in the language of the buyer.

Author: Michelle Ritter
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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