Keynote slides: The Power of Social Media and Future Organizations

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This morning I am giving the external keynote at a closed conference for senior client executives run by a major professional services firm. They know the technical content they are presenting is rather dry so my role is to provide a highly engaging kick-off to the day (spouses are invited too) which is also practical and useful for attendees.

As is quite often the case these days, my client asked me to combine two of the topics from my general list of speaking topics, bringing together the ideas from The Power of Social Media and The Future of Work and Organizations. In fact every presentation I do is customized for the specific context and audience, including many topics not on the list, but it can be useful for clients to use the general speaking topic list to work out what they are looking for.

Here are the slides to my keynote. The usual disclaimer: the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to be viewed by themselves, but you still might find them interesting.

Keynote: The Power of Social Media and Future Organizations

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Revisiting the future of PR

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For many reasons PR (or perhaps rather what PR could be) is close to the center of my interests. As we shift to a world driven by social media and influence networks, arguably the PR industry has the best background and capabilities to help organizations deal with the new challenges and opportunities that are emerging.

Yet the PR industry has not markedly prospered relative to adjacent industries, which have muscled in on the new work generated in a rapidly changing landscape. ‘Public relationships’, if we take the term literally, dominate the agenda, yet PR is not dominating the discussion.

I recently recalled that I wrote the article Six Facets of the Future of PR well over 5 years ago now. It’s nice to see that it is still the #1 result on a Google search for ‘future of PR’.

As a good article about the future should be, it is still entirely relevant today. I thought it would be worth revisiting a few of the points I made, as they probably bear repeating.

Six Facets of the Future of PR

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Futurist conversation: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the role of a futurist

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Continuing our series of conversations with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, and myself, here is the one we kicked off with: what is the role of a futurist?

Here are a few of the topics we discuss:
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How large professional service firms are shifting to networked services and open innovation

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I recently ran a workshop on the future of business at the strategy offsite of one of the world’s largest professional services firm.

During the evening I had a very interesting conversation with one of the regional directors about how professional service firms are tapping external networks.

For over a decade I have written and spoken about the rise of networked professional services, looking at the trend for independent professionals to collaborate in order to compete with large firms. As I wrote in Chapter 9 of Living Networks:

Professional networks, although hardly a new phenomenon, are rapidly rising in importance. Their evolution is being driven by both the new ways of working enabled by connectivity, and the swift shift to professionals working as free agents. Corporate clients are increasingly happy to consider independent professionals as service providers, and in some cases actually prefer effective professional networks to expensive global firms with cookie-cutter approaches. The bottom-line is that for many types of business, professional networks are increasingly viable competitors to large, established firms. This is already apparent, but will become more obvious in coming years.

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The dilemma for professionals: How do you respond to anonymous leaks and slander?

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Today’s Australian Financial Review has an interesting article titled “Watch out for the spook in the navy blue suit” which looks at how professionals can respond to anonymous slander, quoting me and a few others.

It looks at FirmSpy, which is a site that provides gossip about Australian professional firms, notably law firms and the local arms of the Big 4 accounting firms. FirmSpy provides insights into internal issues such as bullying, sexual harassment, and staff satisfaction and turnover, resulting in Australian Financial Review calling it “Australia’s own Wikileaks for lawyers and accountants”.

For those accused of wrongdoing, there are limited possibilities for response. The article says:
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5 Driving Forces of Global Professional Services

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A little while ago I co-authored a White Paper for SAP titled Service Delivery Innovation: Creating Client Value and Enhancing Profitability, focused on large professional services organisations.

Later today I’m running a strategy workshop for a large technology vendor with a significant professional services arm. In the course of preparing for the session I looked back at this paper. While I would probably frame my views somewhat differently now, I thought the section of driving forces was worth sharing.

DRIVING FORCES

Faced with increasingly sophisticated clients, market globalization, and evolving technology, professional services firms must evaluate their business models to ensure they can delivery the greatest value to every client on every project. If firms continue to do business as usual, they will face eroding margins, increased operational complexity and risk, and underleveraged partnerships. Let’s take a moment to look at each of the five fundamental driving forces at work in the professional services marketplace today before we explore how firms can proactively address these trends.


Source: Service Delivery Innovation SAP White Paper
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Why high performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control

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I recently gave a presentation at an offsite meeting of the leadership team of a global professional services firm. I was asked to speak about the future of business, and to be provocative, which is usually my objective in that kind of situation – it’s not very valuable if you can’t get people to think differently.

I discussed the driving forces of global business, and then gave them three ‘propositions’ of how I saw the future of business. One of the three propositions, which was really the underlying theme of my presentation, was ‘High performance organizations will thrive on uncertainty and lack of control.’

When you look at what has really changed in the best performing organizations of today compared to say those of a couple of decades ago, this is at the heart of the matter. Executives used to be in control, know what was happening, and to direct the company’s activities in detail to achieve success. That doesn’t work any more.
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Crowdsourcing attracts the best advertising clients, and it all began with a tweet…

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John Winsor, founder of Victors & Spoils, the world’s first crowdsourced agency, gave the opening keynote at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit in September last November.

It was fascinating to hear about how he had brought together an extraordinarily talented distributed team, and convinced major brands such as Harley-Davidson, GAP, Levi’s, and Virgin America to use a crowdsourcing approach.

Harley-Davidson moved on from its long-standing agency Carmichael Lynch last year, shifting to Victors & Spoils for its creative work. The first work from the agency for Harley-Davidson, based on an idea from “passionate amateur” Whit Hiler, has just been launched:

AdAge interviewed Harley’s Chief Marketing Officer Mark-Hans Richer, who said about the ad:
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How IT analyst firms can learn from investment bank research pricing models

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Gideon Gartner has just posted a great article titled Advisory Industry, a future redesign: the “Payment” Model, in which he draws on investment banking research pricing as a model for IT analysts and their clients. Gideon writes:

So in the Wall Street model The buy-side “analysts” will work closely with their most helpful and favorite sell side analysts, and buy-side “portfolio managers” will work with sell-side salespeople who funnel ideas and information from their research departments to the buy-side clients. During the year, when investment issues arise (many dozens of times each day), the BofA money managers and staff analysts will call several(!) appropriate sell-side analysts, and may even effectively triangulate among them until a level of understanding an issue, or a decision to buy or sell stocks or other investing instruments with traders, can be reached.

Not until the end of the year do the buy side money managers and analysts “vote” for those individual sell-side analysts and salespeople who were most helpful and influential during the past twelve months; and when this process is completed and the numbers added up, the decision is made as to the percentage of trading volume (e.g. money) to be generated for each of the brokerage ?rms for the next year! Thus the compensation will vary somewhat each year based upon trading volumes and perceived relative performance. Most important perhaps, new sell-side firms and analysts are added to the list since innovative and effective research and interactions will be recognized! (the sell-side firm will have sent all its research, and its analysts will accept phone calls hoping or expecting that content and interactions will be recognized and therefore compensated for their value).

He wraps up:

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Key management trend: Reputation management

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I was recently interviewed for a report created by the executive forum Vistage, titled 12 Trends That Will Define Business in the “New Normal”.

One of the key trends covered in the report in which they drew on my thoughts is reputation management, excerpted below.

Trend 7: Reputation Management

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