Preface to the Second Edition

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The second edition of Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships will be launched in New York in June. Below is the preface to the second edition, which gives a good overview of what the book is about… Click on “Read more” below to see the full text.

Two chapters from the book will be posted on my website for free download shortly.

“As I write these words it is almost exactly five and a half years since I finished writing the first edition of this book. The release of the book in January 2000 helped launch a powerful wave of interest in the topic. Immediately after its release, the book was ranked #1 on Amazon.com from Australia for over two months, and since then has spent time on a range of Amazon.com bestseller lists, including the Deloitte & Touche bestseller list for over two years. Not long ago the book went into its fifth printing. The concept of knowledge-based relationships has now become a broadly acknowledged aspect of leading business thinking and practice. Many other threads came together to create this momentum, however I hope the detailed treatment of the topic in the first edition of this book helped to crystallize this emerging domain.

Much has happened since the first edition came out, certainly in terms of changes in the business environment, notably in the professional services landscape, and in how communication technologies are changing business relationships. However during that period, my thinking has evolved even more. Over many years of putting the ideas into practice…

…helping leading organizations to implement knowledge-based relationships, running workshops all over the world for some of the smartest people around, and speaking widely, I have learned a great deal on what works and doesn’t work. I also recognized that I needed to broaden the ambit of my work from the core concept of knowledge-based client relationships to everything that a professional firm must do to be successful in its client relationships.

The first key lesson is that even if you are brilliant at engaging in knowledge-based relationships with your clients, that doesn’t help you if your clients don’t recognize the value you can create for them through this deeper level of engagement. Professionals must lead their clients into knowledge-based relationships by demonstrating the value of collaboration. On every front, the future success of professional services firms will depend absolutely on the leadership capabilities within the firm. They must lead their clients into new ways of working, they must lead their professionals into combining their expertise collaboratively, and they must lead their industries by showing that new business models and approaches to value creation are possible and desirable. Thus the new subtitle of this book: “Leadership in Professional Services.” The subtitle of the original edition, “The Future of Professional Services,” still applies, as knowledge-based relationships are indeed the future of the professions. However the essence of this second edition is how to develop the leadership that will brings these kinds of professional relationships to reality.

One of the major shifts in the second edition is to focus far more on the immediate issues of professional services firms than on the broader issues of knowledge in business. The first edition brought many of the lessons of knowledge management into professional services and organizational relationships, in a way combining the domains. However the real value of the book is in its relevance to its core readership of practicing professionals. It is intended to help them enhance their client relationships, and build practices and firms that will prosper enormously in our burgeoning knowledge economy.

Since writing this book I have written a quite different book, Living Networks, on the implications for business of the connected economy. My work today falls into two domains. I am a specialist in professional services client relationships. And I am a generalist in helping executives understand how to create success in our swiftly-evolving global network economy. These two seemingly disparate themes in fact mesh together into a perfect unity. A networked world is nothing more than a set of relationships. In an intensely commoditized global economy, value creation will be increasingly concentrated in trusting, collaborative, knowledge-based relationships. Professional services, as the quintessential knowledge business, provides a perfect template and model for developing and implementing these kinds of relationships on a broad scale.

The changes to this second edition have resulted in a book that is almost half new material. In some ways I would have liked to have changed more, almost rewritten the entire book, however I also wanted to maintain the integrity of a book that has clearly struck a chord, and has sold consistently very well for five years. With two entirely new chapters, and half the remainder of the book heavily reworked, this second edition has truly been brought up to date and will be of great value to professional services and knowledge practitioners in a rapidly-evolving business environment. There are certainly many challenges ahead for every professional. But looking through the lens of knowledge-based relationships, I believe there are massive opportunities for those that can successfully implement deep, collaborative approaches to value-creation with their clients. I wish you all success on that path.”

Reawakening

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Apologies! It has been far too long since I’ve blogged. Hardly the dynamic stuff of the living networks… I’m sure anyone who has maintained a blog will have experienced the tug between the present urgency of demands like client work, and the broader importance of capturing and communicating a rich flow of ideas. For a while now immediate pressures have kept me below the surface, making my work less visible, but I intend to rekindle my blogging endeavors. Among the very interesting work so far this year, I’ve been working with some colleagues to take the top executives of a mid-tier financial institution through a scenario planning process to examine the company’s long-term future, and working with some of the leading client relationship teams of a global top 10 law firm to enhance their capabilities and approaches. All good stuff, but I want my ideas to flow more broadly…

To this end, I will be relaunching my blog and newsletter in May, including relocating the blog. Watch this space. In the meantime I’ll start to make this more dynamic.

On other fronts, coming up this June is the launch of the second edition of my first book, Developing Knowledge Based Client Relationships. I’ll post the preface to the second edition here shortly. I have also recently established a US corporation to enable me to better serve the US market. More on other projects, including new frames on social network analysis, coming soon.

Wall Street’s view of collaboration

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The BDI Collaboration in Financial Services conference in New York went extremely well, so much so that we intend to run it in London in late spring next year as well as in New York again exactly one year later on September 29, 2005. The conference review describes what happened on the day. Taking a few quick top-of-mind reflections from the event…

The success of the event shows that collaboration and collaboration technologies are recognized as critical issues across financial services. In an industry driven by information flows and deep expertise, allowing professionals in financial institutions and their clients to integrate their work and thinking is clearly the way things are heading. We began to touch on some of the implications for bank strategy and value-creation in the industry in the event; this theme will play a bigger role in our future conferences. However a dominant issue on the day was the regulatory compliance framework as blocking collaboration efforts. For many reasons this is the context within which financial institutions are currently working. In addition to regulators ensuring they are not blocking innovation in financial markets, banks must not allow the regime to put them off implementing approaches that will differentiate them in the eyes of their clients.

I was delighted that we had Steve Wallman as our lunch keynote speaker. I have long admired Steve’s work since when he was SEC Commissioner in 1994-97. This article in Forbes magazine from 1997 shows some of his deeply insightful thinking on intellectual capital, which is still integral to my perspectives on the future of intellectual capital reporting. At lunch the day before the conference someone told me Steve was the best speaker he’d ever seen. I used that anecdote when I introduced him, setting high expectations from the audience, but ones that he definitely met. See the conference review for a few more details on what he covered.

Collaboration in Financial Services conference in NYC

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Collaboration – technological and otherwise – is central to the future of the financial services. In order to address these issues, in conjunction with Business Development Institute and Michael Ross Associates, I am designing and co-organizing a one-day conference in New York on September 29 on Collaboration in Financial Services. Full details are at https://www.bdionline.com/cfs.

We have got a tremendous response to the event. The current key sponsors are Intralinks, I-Deal, Microsoft, Interactive Data Corp, Vignette, Broadvision, and FaceTime, together covering the key technologies that support collaboration in institutional financial services, including real-time collaboration such as IM in a trading environment, document collaboration in deal-making including M&A and syndication, and internal collaboration systems. Many of the leading investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, CSFB, Bank of America etc. etc. are involved. Banks now see collaboration as a key driver both internally, and externally with clients. While there are significant compliance and security issues in the short-term especially, the core issues are first technological, and then process, organizational, cultural, and strategic. Banks are recognizing these will be major shifts, and there is lots to do in gearing themselves up to address these issues.

The reality is that we are far from achieving the potential of collaboration technologies in the financial services industry. Much of the reason is standards battles have at times dramatically slowed progress. A classic example is instant messaging, which is already at the core of communication in many of the financial markets such as bond trading, but the reluctance of AOL, Yahoo, and MSN to enable interoperability between their instant messaging systems has placed severe constraints on how banks can implement these technologies. Many similar issues remain in other domains, including establishing collaborative workspaces for M&A and other complex deal-making.

Part of my vision for the conference is to contribute to the industry – comprising both banks and vendors – acknowledging and beginning to address some of these standards issues. The last high-level panel session of the day will focus specifically on creating an industry roadmap to enable greater benefit from collaborative technologies in the near future. This conference will be run annually, and we may also establish some kind of working committees to help further these agendas on an ongoing basis.

Hope to see you there!

The Future of Knowledge Management

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I recently wrote an article on The Future of Knowledge Management for the Australian Financial Review which has attracted substantial attention. It also been slightly adapted to be published in the current edition of the leading knowledge management journal, KM Review, as “The Five Key Frames for the Future of KM”, and once I get a moment free (!) will also adapt it for some other publications that have requested it.

The basic theme is that “knowledge management” is no longer the most useful name to apply to much of the work that has flourished in this broad domain. It’s always been too unwieldy a term and concept, and today we have a number of emerging frames that are more relevant and practical to today’s business challenges. The term “knowledge management” still has a long, solid future, however several of the more focused disciplines it has spawned offer more traction for business. One leading practitioner said that he is finding that companies are referring less and less to KM, with one of the terms succeeding it being “organizational effectiveness”. Indeed, that’s a central objective, and more focused thinking is more likely to get us there.

In October I’ll be speaking at KMWorld in Silicon Valley and ActKM – a leading government KM community and conference – in Canberra. During the late 1990s I was strongly associated with KM, and it’s around five years now that I’ve been endeavoring to move beyond that. It’s interesting that I’m being drawn back a little into that domain. Despite my misgivings on the terminology, there is much in KM that will continue to be immensely valuable in what absolutely is a knowledge-based economy.

The Future of Customer Relationships

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I’ve just posted a new article on Creating the Future of Customer Relationships on my Advanced Human Technologies company website. The article supports the keynote speech I delivered recently at Customer Contact World 2004.

The article examines how to integrate the entire spectrum of relationship channels available in order to build true “knowledge-based” customer relationships. This is founded on understanding – and accentuating – the difference between what technology can do and people can do. Fast Company magazine’s blog wrote about and linked to the article, which has resulted in lots of attention and traffic for this.

The Metaweb

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Nova Spivack, the grandson of Peter Drucker, has a vision of the connected future that aligns very strongly with mine. He describes the emerging “Metaweb” as the result of the rapid increase in both information connectivity and social connectivity, leading to the emergence of the global brain. A diagram and overview is provided on his website – well worth a look. I agree wholeheartedly this is the way we’re going.

The Rise of Social Networking Technologies: video and references

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I recently gave a brief, casual presentation on The Rise of Social Networking Technologies to a very interesting group of technology innovation professionals in Sydney called Innovation Bay. A video of my presentation is at https://www.viocorp.com/clients/innovationbay.

I prepared a crib sheet for those attending the talk, as below, giving a few references and thoughts on this space….

What defines this space is that it taps existing connections between people – our “six degrees of separation” – to form new, useful direct connections.

Selected Social Networking Technologies

Social/ dating/ politics

Friendster

Tribe.net

Orkut

I Stand For

Professional

LinkedIn

Ecademy

Ryze

ZeroDegrees.com

Corporate

Spoke

Visible Path

Matcheroo

Related applications

Jobs: Monster.com

CRM: Interaction

Search: Eurekster

Content: LinkSV

Microsoft Research: Wallop

Event technologies

nTag

SpotMe

PowerMingle

CRG

Intro

Business models

Subscription

Subscription for higher-level functionality

Pay per request

Link to classifieds

Targeted advertising

Enterprise implementation

Suggested references

Stanford Business School Alumni Social Networking Panel video

Stowe Boyd’s weblog (see especially under Recent Publications)

Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

Later I’ll post some thoughts on where this whole space is going, including industry consolidation, user growth, business models, reputation systems, collaborative filtering, learning on demand, and more. Plenty has already been said on the current primary issues of privacy and extending trust through networks, not that these are close to being resolved…

Media jamming in the presidential election

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Howard Dean’s post-Iowa primary “yeagh!” is now famous. This has provided the opportunity for musicians (and geeks) to rework and remix his speech to music. At last count there were 45 remixes available for discerning political pundits. All it took was one person to come up with the idea to do a remix of Dean’s speech, plenty more jumped on board, and it became a media phenomenon.

This is a fantastic illustration of what I call “media jamming”: taking media and playing with it, improvising variations and twists, then feeding it back into the media system. We can now all participate in the whole media infrastructure by how we rework and reinterpret what flows, building it into a ever-evolving feedback loop instead of simply a one-to-many broadcast system.

The other great example of this recently was when Cherie Blair sang the Beatles tune “When I’m 64” in response to demands for a song at a Chinese press conference, and it was remixed as an Ibizadance hit. Her song was also rumored to be available as a mobile ringtone.

These are some early and evident examples of what will develop into an entire world of media jamming. This promises lots of fun in store!

Living Networks Forum debrief

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The Living Networks Forum in New York the other day was great fun and went extremely well. Both anecdotal and formal feedback was excellent. The official commentary on the event is here. When you’re trying something new, you never know quite how it will work until it happens, but the reality was a very good match with my original vision. The core concept was creating connections between people and ideas at the event, and that’s exactly what happened in a very rich fashion. In the end the way in which we created serendipitous connections at this event was more based on innovative facilitation processes than technology, however in future events the technology will gradually be integrated to take this “enhanced serendipity” to the next levels.

The major sectors respresented at the Forum—because of the location and the representation of both my and Business Development Institute’s core communities—were professional services, financial services, and technology. All these sectors are grappling with similar issues in the event’s core themes of developing client relationships, enhancing collaboration, and creating partnerships, so the cross-pollination was invaluable for participants. We began the session with a space-based facilitation process, in which people position themselves in a room according to their relative interests in key themes, enabling immediate connections with people with similar profiles. For each of the themes we had a brief presentation of core material, and then demonstrations, syndicate group discussions, and break-out exercises. All of the groups for both syndicate discussions and exploring potential partnerships were carefully designed around participants’ profiles. In this way the connections were not “engineered,” but facilitated. Before lunch we played a game between teams based on game theory, which was used to explore some of the dynamics of trust development over time. Much hilarity and some confusion here—it went well but perhaps a little redesign required for next time.

The overriding theme of how technology can enhance personal and organizational networks drove much of the very tangible excitement at the event. While by this time most attendees had come across the concept of social software and some of its implications, being able to see and experience the technologies helped to bring to life how these can be applied in business. Earlier in the week I’d been to the Christmas party of SDForum—the leading Silicon Valley technology networking organization—where the interest in social software was immense.

The social software space is hot, Hot, HOT! I frame what is currently happening as phase two. Phase one began with the now defunct sixdegrees.com and a couple of similar initiatives. After a lull and some nascent initiatives last year, this year has seen the space take off big time. Living Networks Forum gold sponsor Spoke Software has recently secured another $11.7 million in funding. Business is waking up to the fact that not only is this a new technology sector with strong promise—because of its ability to create value—but also that these technologies could transform how businesspeople communicate, form relationships, and develop trust. I’ll be writing a lot more about this later—this is a seriously important topic.

Perhaps not surprisingly, both Business Development Institute and myself have had numerous enquiries since the Forum about designing and running innovative events. There is an increasing recognition that it really is possible to create conferences and events that are far more valuable to participants than what we usually experience, by carefully designing for rich sharing of knowledge and ideas and forming connections in valuable ways, fully integrated with novel and useful content. We’ll probably run at least one other public Living Networks Forum somewhere in the US next year, however it seems as if more of the demand will be for creating similar events for professional associations, user groups, vendors, and inside organizations that need to create richer connections and exchanges between divisions and locations.