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media file 6.7.10 | An environmental movement for the mind

An environmental movement for the mind

On the Adbusters site, environmentalist Bill McKibben turns his attention to an ecological danger that threatens to overtake carbon dioxide pollution or toxic oil spills as the number one environmental problem we face. In fact, it is the source of these problems: the poisoning of our culture by hyper commercialism and the extreme self-absorption it breeds. While throughout the centuries our mental environment has been polluted by church, state, and other institutions, this century presents the first moment in which almost the entirety of our personal and collective experience is mediated for us via for-profit media enterprises. The global consumer monoculture that is arising from this new form of mental pollution is threatening to place basic collective values--such as concern for the impact of one’s actions upon others--on the endangered ideas list.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for June 7, 2010:

How systems thinking can save your company

Corporate executives invariably give lip service to “systems thinking”--the management philosophy, originating in the early 20th century, that views the company as a complex social system and living community. But when push comes to shove, they fall back on even earlier thinking, from the 18th and 19th centuries--the company as a machine, which can be manipulated by optimizing discrete functions without awareness of how a change in one function might ripple through the whole. Such thinking locks in static solutions that can themselves become a source of destabilization, as the company confronts a complex and fast-changing business environment. Systems thinking, authentically applied, can invest a company with the insight to to adapt to unexpected developments, self-correct via trial-and-error learning and experimentation, and gain a detailed, intimate understanding of how the parts of the business fit together as a whole. Management guru Andrea Gabor writes for strategy+business.

The surprise leadership skill that CEOs value most

In a recent survey of 1500 CEOs conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value, creativity was selected as the single most important leadership attribute required for the successful enterprise of the future--not operational effectiveness, discipline, or any other of the characteristics selected in previous studies. Why the surprising shift in attitude? Global complexity, the CEOs said, has changed everything. The interplay of global forces like climate change with international finance, political, and regulatory systems has added a new layer of complexity to such critical issues as supply chain management and even workforce competitiveness. To see this complexity as an opportunity and not a paralyzing threat, today’s new leaders need the capacity, which creativity supplies, to break with existing organizational attitudes and assumptions and instead embrace business models fueled by an ethic of continuous innovation. IBM’s Frank Kern writes for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Scale the impact, not the overhead

Social enterprises have historically focused their social-impact strategies on replication: extending their successful programs into new service areas in a linear fashion, thereby achieving increases in social impact that are tied directly to increases in available resources. Such approaches impose hard limitations on an organization’s ability to achieve its social impact potential, and in many cases simply prove unsustainable. There’s another way, writes Bridgespan Group managing partner Jeffrey Bradach for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Social enterprises can look to the for-profit sector for scaling strategies that multiply social impact with minimal increases in resources and overhead. Among these strategies: extend program reach via digital networks; build networks of partner organizations; develop talent; and generate demand for new ideas via marketing.

B2B spending on social media set to explode

While business-to-business firms have been late to the party in social media marketing, that’s getting set to change, according to a new report by eMarketer. The reasons are straightforward: B2B marketing is typically much more information-intensive than consumer product marketing, and so therefore it lends itself perfectly to the long-form tools of social media: blogs, podcasts, webinars, online learning communities, etc. Spending is expected to quintuple in the next five years, according to Forrester Research numbers cited in the eMarketer report.

The new Yahoo starting to look like the new AOL

With its $100 million purchase of content aggregator Associated Content, Yahoo has taken a sharp turn in the direction of AOL, which recently underwent a wrenching transformation that turned it from an ailing Internet service provider into a leading digital content company. Similarly, with the Associated Content acquisition, Yahoo is staging itself to move from being an online portal primarily serving other people’s content to becoming the dominant producer of original content for the web. Already, Yahoo serves almost three times the page views of AOL, and 200 times the page views of The New York Times. Business Insider reports.

media file 5.17.10 | The five forces reshaping the global economy

The five forces reshaping the global economy

In the sixth annual McKinsey Global Survey, over 1400 corporate executives from around the world identified the top five forces shaping their organizations’ strategies: (1) the shift in global economic activity from developed to developing countries; (2) the rise of the consumer in emerging markets; (3) increasingly global labor markets; (4) the impact of global digital networks in facilitating the flow of goods, information, and capital; and (5) rising government and stakeholder expectations about the role of business in contributing to the public good. The McKinsey Quarterly reports.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for May 17, 2010:

America’s green innovation problem

It’s received wisdom in many business circles--and the thesis of some bestselling pop business texts--that America can retain its strategic edge in global markets by focusing on innovation, even while manufacturing, customer service, and other core business activities get outsourced to other countries. But if trends in green innovation are any measure, this view will ultimately prove bankrupt--both for the companies that bet on it, and for American society as a whole. Globalization is rapidly overtaking the field of innovation, particularly in green technology, where the Chinese government is exploiting the powerful feedback loops that can be created when innovation, manufacturing, and marketing are advanced in tandem. Left unchallenged, governments pursuing this strategy could end up locking in strategic advantage in key markets--and locking America out. Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

Goldman Sachs and Drucker’s law of innovation

What’s the link between mortgage-backed securities and ATMs? Easy--both are financial market innovations. What’s the difference? One followed the route all successful innovations follow--delivering a product or process that fundamentally improves customers’ lives--while the other exploited innovation solely to the innovator’s advantage. The resulting catastrophe was predictable, writes Drucker Institute Executive Director Rick Wartzman for Bloomberg Businessweek. Peter Drucker himself predicted such a mess in a 1999 essay, where he compared compared derivates and other such financial innovations to the “systems” invented by professional gamblers to beat the house. They almost never work, Drucker observed; but the collateral damage they produce to markets and reputations can be enormous, as Goldman Sachs and others have found out.

Should all corporations adopt the “precautionary principle”?

“First do no harm”--the so-called “precautionary principle” has been a shared human value virtually since the dawn of civilization, and yet contemporary business practice seems to regularly defy it. Is it possible to fundamentally shift this dynamic--to inject the precautionary principle into the DNA of every contemporary corporation, so that episodes like the financial meltdown and the Gulf oil disaster become a thing of the past? On CSRwire, attorney Sanford Lewis explores the new risk-management strategies and innovations in corporate law that promise to make the precautionary principle a bedrock of corporate governance, rather than an afterthought.

If corporations are people, then shouldn’t they act like it?

The recent Supreme Court campaign finance ruling in the Citizens United case effectively conferred the same political free-speech rights on corporations that had previously existed only for individuals. So shouldn’t corporations be held to the same standard of personal responsibility that individuals live by? On the Harvard Business site, corporate sustainability advocate Andrew Winston argues that businesses owe society nothing less--or more--than to live by the Golden Rule: to do unto others as they would have done unto them. This approach is the only one that can effectively balance the environmental, sociological, and stakeholder concerns that are shaping the nature of business in the 21st century. Businesses should adopt this new model for the most selfish of all possible reasons--because it’s the only possible path to corporate sustainability in an era in which all stakeholders have effectively found their voice and are projecting it over the social web.

What do you call the world?

There is a famous story from Zen literature that goes like this:

Teacher A asks Teacher B: “Where do you come from?” (Sometimes a trick question.)

Teacher B replies: “From the south.” (Ah, a safe answer.)

A asks: “How is Zen practice in the South these days?”

B responds: “There lots of discussion.”

A states: “How can all the discussion compare to planting the fields and cooking rice?”

B asks: “What can you do about the world?”

A replies: “What do you call the world?”

media file 6.22.09 | Why nonprofits rule social media

Why nonprofits rule social media

In this Conversation Starter on the Harvard Business site, social media consultant Alexandra Samuel argues that the notable success of nonprofit organizations like Kiva in implementing social media strategies is a natural outgrowth of what the sector does best: build deep and explicitly accountable relationships with stakeholders. Businesses can experience similar success by adopting some nonprofit best practices, including: (1) avoid gimmicks, and instead speak to stakeholders’ core concerns; (2) give clients a high degree of decision-making freedom and control; (3) offer a mix of tangible and social benefits; (4) embrace the stakeholder community’s emergent social values; and (5) innovate within the boundaries of one’s core mission.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for June 22, 2009:

Why social media gimmicks don’t work

A short, sharp reality smackdown from social media guru Andy Sernovitz: Whatever get-rich scheme you are cooking up, forget it. Instead of trying to trick or bribe people into engaging with your product or service, just build a better product and customer experience... and love will follow.

Kiva: When nonprofit is the best business model

Stanford Social Innovation Review profiles Kiva, the groundbreaking peer-to-peer microfinance exchange, to learn how it became one of the fastest growing nonprofits in history. Surprisingly, a great part of its success has to do with its nonprofit status itself: By adopting a business model that maximizes social value and leaves profit on the table, Kiva has managed to attract a range of support services that have lowered its cost of doing business and allowed it to scale rapidly. Likewise, it has dodged the legal and regulatory challenges that would have accompanied any attempt to organize as a for-profit lender. And finally, it has been able to establish a steady, growing stream of capital from a virtual community that supports it precisely because it operates purely from a socially constructive agenda.

Maximizing the (non) profit motive

BusinessWeek covers the emergence of new corporate legal structures designed to make it easier for organizations to blend for-profit business models with socially constructive aims. While the law typically holds that a corporation’s primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value, these new structures make it possible for a for-profit organization to incorporate a social-purpose agenda directly into its charter, and to behave in other ways that are more common to non-profits--raising money in the form of grants and charitable loans, for example. Likewise, they give non-profits new tools to raise capital and engage in for-profit activities, without having to construct elaborate workarounds.

Crowdsourcing: What it means for innovation

In BusinessWeek, innovation guru John Winsor explores the future of “crowdsourcing”--the practice of engaging individuals outside the traditional supply chain in the process of product and business system innovation. While some analysts fear that crowdsourcing will spell the end of the corporate design firm, and others worry that it will drive down the perceived value of new products and services, still others believe that customer participation and mass collaboration will usher in a new era in which customers become deeply invested in the success of the crowdsourced innovation and the enterprise that stands behind it.

Not all collaborations are created equal

On The Big Shift blog on the Harvard Business site, authors and management consultants John Hegel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison discuss “scalable collaboration”: a form of collaboration that moves beyond feel-good progressivity to a style of organizational behavior that delivers increasing returns over time. Three key traits distinguish collaborative styles that are scalable from those that are not: (1) They produce new knowledge and relationships versus specific solutions and results; (2) they are loosely organized in ways that easily admit new participants; and (3) they are designed to advance the group’s future capacity versus simply to leverage its existing strengths.

Got the old-media blues? There’s an app for that

Advertising Age reports on a new initiative by traditional print media firm Rodale to make digital content pay, via an iPhone app for its Men’s Health magazine brand. Users pay $1.99 for the app, which provides basic workout set instructions along with a system for tracking individual progress. Directly within the app, users can then buy additional workout sets to supplement the base set. This strategy opens up a source of revenue--paid subscriptions--that publishers have historically relied upon but has been hard to come by on the largely free Internet. The in-app purchase option is a feature of the new OS 3 for the iPhone.

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< richmedium > | social innovation in the global marketplace explores the business, cultural, and technological forces that are reshaping the process of creating value in global markets, and giving rise to a new strategic framework for designing and scaling media and marketing organizations, nonprofits, and social enterprises.

media file 12.1.08 | Digital entrepreneurs should “work on stuff that matters”

Tech guru Tim O’Reilly to next generation: Get serious

The LA Times profiles digital pioneer Tim O’Reilly and his critique of the current crop of digital enterprises. Today’s digital entrepreneurs have cocooned in a “reality bubble” insulated from poverty, disease, global warming, and other problems that are gripping the planet, he argues. They should follow the model of some of the world’s most successful technology companies, including Google and Microsoft, which sprang from their founders’ efforts to “work on stuff that matters.”

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for December 1, 2008:

The bottom billion: A difficult market or a source of innovation?

On the Harvard Business site, Forrester VP Navi Radjou discusses how leading global firms--Microsoft, most notably among them--are treating the world’s most underdeveloped markets as breakthrough business opportunities rather than as occasions to demonstrate corporate social responsibility.

Media zone to open in Abu Dhabi

The Abu Dhabi newspaper The National reports that the government has launched a new media innovation zone in partnership with the BBC, CNN, Reuters, and a number of other leading global media brands. The zone is scheduled to launch in 2009.

National Geographic teams with Abu Dhabi to make movies

The Washington Post reports that the Abu Dhabi government has struck a $100 million deal with the National Geographic Society to create a revolving fund to develop and produce 10 to 15 films over a five-year period. According to Tim Kelly, president of the National Geographic’s global media division, the goal of the pact is to “put money on the screen,” funneling funds to filmmakers all over the world.

NBC relaunches local TV sites as web destinations

MediaPost reports on NBC’s plan to transform its local TV station web sites into broader online communities offering news, information, entertainment, and social media tools. Its new, “Locals Only” sites will feature content from print and online publications, bloggers, and NBC’s local TV stations. The initiative rolls out with revamped sites for Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco.

Mainstream news outlets start linking to other sites

ONTD! The New York Times reports that mainstream media outlets have recently ramped up the number of links they post to content on other sites. They even have a new name for it: “link journalism.” The idea is to produce a new generation of online news media, supported by local, paid product/service directories.

Five web 2.0 businesses for a down economy

Mashable looks at a seriously disrupted, cash starved digital market and asks, “What new opportunities exist here”? Keywords: Coworking spaces, bootstrapping, collaborative tools, idea marketplaces, workforce marketplaces.

Open source is not a business model

ReadWriteWeb reports on a study by The 451 Group showing that most open source vendors make ends meet via proprietary software and services. In this study of 114 vendors, open source is more of a business tactic than a business model.

media file 10.22.08 | "Social innovation": doing business with the “bottom billion”

Social innovation: Creating products for those at the bottom of the pyramid

INSEAD Knowledge reprises its executive roundtable on the challenges global corporations face in designing and executing “social innovation” strategies--business initiatives targeting the four billion or so people living on less than one dollar per day in developing countries. More than price, executives reported that access to highly segmented, low income markets has proven to be the greatest barrier to product distribution and sales. Partnership with government agencies and nonprofit organizations is key to overcoming this problem, executives said. Another insight: Philanthropic models, in which products or services are donated to needy communities, turn out to be far less successful in delivering sustained social impact than market-based models, in which corporations set up locally run businesses.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for October 22, 2008:

Strong partnership key to success in social innovation

INSEAD Knowledge explores the reasons why global corporations find it so difficult to successfully execute “social innovation” strategies targeting the “bottom of the pyramid”: the four billion people living on less than one dollar per day. The primary reason: Global corporations have become “disembedded” from local economies, especially poor ones, and therefore they have insufficient knowledge of the specialized needs of these market segments. Another reason: Global corporations may harbor expectations about short-term profitability that run counter to the substantial time and effort required to launch and scale projects that deliver mutual benefit to both the corporation and the poor. Corporations can improve their chances through strong collaboration with governments, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs.

Social media in Africa, part I: The market

ReadWriteWeb posts the first in a three-part series on the growth of social media in Africa. The continent is the fastest growing mobile market in the world, with 280 million subscribers and a 30.4 percent penetration rate. The social media sector is currently dominated by independent and nonprofit media operations.

Social media in Africa, part II: Mobile innovations

ReadWriteWeb continues its three-part series on the growth of social media in Africa with a review of how the continent’s technical infrastructure is determining the shape of digital innovation. Due to a history of unstable governance and civil unrest in the 20th century, the continent largely bypassed the era of community infrastructure building that characterized most of Western society during that period. As a result, there is no entrenched land-based communications establishment; the vast majority of Africans tap into the global communications grid via mobile phone and satellite. This situation has spawned a rush to fill satellite demand, plus an explosion in innovative mobile applications such as micropayments, mobile news, and GPS-based theft-deterrent systems for automobiles.

Social media in Africa, part III: Democracy

ReadWriteWeb concludes its three-part series on the growth of social media in Africa with a brief survey of web and mobile applications that are undermining the grip of totalitarian regimes on the flow of information within their societies. The most exciting aspect of these innovative applications is their source: local social entrepreneurs, not foreign aid groups, governments, or corporations. For the continent, this explosion in indigenous social media offers the opportunity to start fresh: new ideas, and a billion people to use them.

Mobile subscribers increase worldwide

ClickZ summarizes a report by the International Telecommunications Union on the worldwide explosion in mobile communications technology usage. By the end of 2008, subscriptions to mobile service providers will top 4 billion, for a global market penetration rate of 61 percent. Subscriptions have been growing at an average of 24 percent annually since 2000.

Meredith expands reach of magazines overseas

The Des Moines Register reports on the expansion of Meredith Corporation’s magazine business into developing countries. Publisher of women’s titles such as Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, and Family Circle, Meredith licenses its content to over 25 partners in 40 countries, with most new deals closing in the developing world. According to the World Bank, more than 56 percent of the global middle class resides in developing countries; by 2030, that number will rise to 93 percent. Meredith officials believe they are properly positioned to help those upwardly mobile populations satisfy curiosity about Western life.

HipChicas.com targets tween latinas with eco-friendly virtual world

MediaPost profiles HipChicas.com, a virtual world targeting socially conscious pre-teen and teenage Hispanic-American girls. Says the site’s founder, Lazaro Fuentes: “It’s as if somewhere along the line, someone decided that being hip meant that girls had to dress or act inappropriately, or had to fit into a specific mold, and that their only interests are picking hair colors or shopping for clothes. They are far more than that. These are kids that want to save the world, be in a band, and start a blog all in one day.”