Deb Lavoy News & Articles

What will the 21st Century organizations aspire to?

Perhaps the most welcome business innovation in the 21st century is the realization that the 1990’s CEO pablum, “People are our greatest asset” is actually true. 

During our inaugural public CMSWire Google+ Hangout session in December, we chatted with experts on how social business is challenging for large companies to implement, but also how it as been successful in limited cases.

What we have ourselves here is a chasm. Collaboration isn't breaking out all over.

You’ve been promised collective intelligence, but there’s more. Complexity is both the problem and -- if properly understood -- the solution.

Agree with her or not, Deb Lavoy's articles have stirred debate in the last year, which is just what she wants to do. We interviewed Deb to learn a little bit more about our top contributor of 2012.

The prevailing theory is that the main reason your business is not yet “social” is that you aren’t trying hard enough to change your culture. Really?

In 2013, I predict that the "culture" bluff will be called. Technology will be called to account for its fair share of the challenge.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

-- Steve Jobs Stanford University commencement address, June 2005

“Culture eats technology for lunch” is a clever line that’s been circulating for a couple of years in the social business circuit. I’m not really sure who said it first (feel free to claim it), but all your favorite people have quoted it. It's meant to suggest that social business isn’t a technology problem, but a cultural one. But that is a distraction. Becoming a social business is about neither.

Nike again showed its marketing (but not just marketing) genius with this ad developed for the 2012 Olympic games. The ad uses the “if you have a body you are an athlete” tag line and takes it even higher. They remind us that greatness is not the stuff of legends, but within reach of every single one of us. 

For so long, we have been taught that marketing is about persuading people to buy something. It's about the end result -- the sale. Well things have changed and marketing has evolved. Yes, many online marketing processes are still about that end result, but there's a another way to build loyal subscribers to your brand, and it's not about selling, it's about providing something valuable -- information. That is the essence of content marketing. What's the hardest part of content marketing? Now that's a good question.

There is much said about employee engagement these days -- how it is essential to great business outcomes, and how it is often shockingly low. Gallup’s 2009 statistical analysis across multiple studies show pretty radical correlations between having engaged employees and corporate outcomes.

If you are reading this, then you have probably been thinking about and working toward incorporating social technologies and philosophies into your business (or other people’s) for a couple of years. There is endless material on the topic available for your reading and viewing pleasure.

It can be complicated. It can be overwhelming. But it can also be fairly straightforward if you think about it from the right perspective. This is a list designed to help get that straightforward perspective -- to take stock before diving deep into the details.

Great parents, teachers, leaders and teammates have some surprising similarities. They get into other people’s heads. David Brooks' editorial last year on the new business skills of attunement, sympathy and metis -- proposed they lead to the condition of “limerence.” This term, in addition to being poetic and highly unusual in a business context, may in fact, be the common link. And, I submit, that it is limerence at scale that is the true brand aspiration.

The world has been chapping our collective hides about metrics for social business. Customers want them, and not without reason. Our typical answers (ROI is irrelevant, What’s the ROI of your mother, it depends on the business problem) have some merit, but in the end, we still need to demonstrate the efficacy of social approaches to business challenges. Probably.
 

Photo courtesy of Stephen Harris (Flickr).