The ECI provides European Citizens the ability to present legislative initiatives directly to the European Commission provided they have a million signatures from EU citizens in a representative set of countries. Links at the end of this post provide the details.

Rather than creating a large and complex program, the ECI’s basic structure revolves around open source software supporting registering an initiative and submitting signatures for validation.   That may not sound like much, but in an environment of social media and technology it gives EU citizens the basic interfaces to engage the formal structures of the European Commission and the rest is up to them.

In preparing for and participating in the panel a number of thoughts came to mind on the nature of technology, public policy and the future of direct citizen participation.

• The ECI is correct in conceiving of social media as the ‘technology’ for creating an environment for the initiative. Incorporating social media into the citizen centric strategy not only recognizes the reality of social media in society, but also encourages direct citizen action and innovation without prescribing a platform or approach.

• Social media platforms, like Face Book, Google, Twitter, etc. provide a platform with the scale and reach necessary to engage the large and diverse EU citizenry.

• Social media’s communications capabilities are well suited for sharing the depth of information associated with a strong citizen initiative.  I can imagine these sites holding more than just calls for support.  These sites can become key educational, documentation and discussion sites.  Imagine video’s that document conditions and situations, position papers that outline aspects of the initiative and debates where the community forms and reforms the initiative prior to its submission.  Those are the types of collaborative capabilities that can drive strong, positive and participatory policies and initiatives.

The open, participatory and self initiated aspects of social media tools match up well with the principles associated with the ECI.  These same aspects have the potential to change the nature of public discourse, government transparency and the like.  A few thoughts in these areas include:

• Social media in public policy can change the nature of policy development toward building solutions rather than supporting stances.  This creates the potential to shift the policy development process from a basis of exchanging single issues or interests based views to multi-lateral working discussions to craft an initiative prior to the ECI process.  This has the potential to change the nature of NGO’s and other policy influencers moving them away from advocacy for a position toward collaborating to solve a problem.   Call me naïve, but if all social media does is raise the volume of single interest, single views then we are poorer for it.

• Changing the level of transparency and participation in EC/EU deliberations concerning successful initiatives.  The current process, as I understand it, involves closed deliberation and consideration of initiatives that complete the ECI process.  I believe that the participation and transparency required for the front part of the ECI process, will lead to similar requirements in the deliberation and decision making of policy makers to not only use the content generated in the initiative process but also to engage the community in deliberations and discussions.  It is hard to open the front end of a process and make it more transparent and keep the back end closed.

• The ECI can be seen as part of a range of legislative processes and approaches.  Viewed in this context, the ECI plays an important role in submitting initiatives that should compliment rather than compete with other approaches and channels.   Recognizing the uniqueness of the ECI process should allow it to have different features and performance expectations as not every process is best to address all policy challenges and issues.

• Much of the ECI process will be ‘do it yourself’ in terms of citizens taking direct responsibility to organize, discuss, debate and develop their initiatives and tools.  There are few prescribed rules for the ECI, which opens the door for creativity and innovation in the policy development and debate process.  Sure it would be nice to have prescribed content policies, platforms, and premade tools as some at the meeting asked for, but such pre-structuring of the environment can also pre-structure the nature of the debate and set operational limits.  A practical and innovative way of being neutral is to be open and lay down a few clear rules, processes and tools which the ECI has done.

The ECI has many of the characteristics associated with successful mass collaboration. We identified these characteristics in researching how large organizations apply social media to achieve meaningful results for the book, The Social Organization.  Having a compelling purpose, just enough structure and the right level of sponsorship are all critical for success.

The launch of the ECI last week represents the first mile in a new approach to direct citizen involvement in the legislative process.  Submitting legislation is also the last mile for many in the policy arena as ideas turn into proposed rules and laws. How these two connect and collaborate using social media is something I look forward to observing in the future.

Related links

European Citizens initiative Web Site

European Citizens Initiative Face Book Page

That is the question business leaders are working their way through.  We already know a few things as we try to define a world ‘beyond service’.  Here are a few things that I believe we will need to incorporate.

• It will have a deeper connection to the individual, their goals and needs
• It will be delivered via a blend of communications and computing technologies
• It will have a social component
• It will support customer self expression
• It will incorporate location and condition into its value proposition
• It will evolve rapidly
• It will not fit into any readily available category
• It will require significantly more and different data then we have now, used in different ways
• Suppliers will not define it so much as by a consensus of consumers and interested parties.

So what do you call something that is personal, technological, social, customizable, unique, informational etc.  The name is something that goes beyond a product or service, or product/service, or even the notion of ‘prosumers’ advocated by Don Tapscott.  It’s more than a facility or a platform like Facebook or your bank.

One way to think about it is to call it a “SITUATION.”

Situation could be the term for a new set of offerings that create value in the world of digitized, social, networked, personal, peer influenced world.  The idea behind a situation is to capture something that is more than providing a ‘service in context’ that type of smarter approach may be a stepping-stone, but it still more about using information to slot customers into predetermined service scenarios than really addressing the situation.

Why do we need a designation of something beyond service?

Service replaced the idea of solutions as customers wanted to leverage our resources, assets, knowledge and products into extending their value propositions.  Services freed companies from having to replicate functions that were not essential to their value creation – think FedEx or UPS in logistics, Credit Cards in Accounts Receivable etc.  These services quickly came together and are now a standard of competitive strategy.

But what happens after you give people services?  You could sell them smaller services or integrate services into larger bundles or you could think of what is the next addressable frontier in terms of creating unique and sustainable value.  Addressable expressed in terms of the ability of business and technology infrastructure and substructure that makes it possible to do something new or at a price point or at a scale or at all three that was not feasible before.

Take the characterizations mentioned above and you can think of situation as the totality of them rather than simple combinations.  Some will say so what, are not the following forms of situation:

• Context or ‘smart’ situations = service + information analytics (data, Bi)
• Location situations = service + device location information (foursquare)
• Social situations = service + social media (web casts, move on, etc.)
• Event situations = service + social media + location (concert or flash mob)
• Etc.

Yes, but we need to push beyond that, because when we do we get a definition of something that is unique to the individual and therefore a source of unique value and competitive advantage.

A situation is about a broader definition of customer need.  Need in terms of a situation exists at a point, place, condition, emotion in time.  While that comes and goes and no one is ever the same, situations are commonly understood, think situation comedy or the phenomenon of schadenfreude and you get the idea.

People are already trying to integrate and support situations on their own

You can already see situations forming as people surround themselves with sets of disparate but related technologies to build support for their situations.  Recently I was out with my son, who is working on the east coast.  We were driving in his car, his GPS was plugged in, his cellphone one, and we were running errands based on recommendations he received from Yelp!

The idea of situation as something beyond service became apparent when we changed plans, the situation changed and the value of our prior plans and preparation dropped considerably.  I would up, reassembling the situation on the GPS (new location), the phone (Texting people) all based on new recommendations from Yelp! Accessed via the smart phone.

Thinking about the future of value creation beyond service opens the door to new competitors, value propositions and opportunity.  So as you put your strategies and plans to the test for this year and the next five years or so, ask yourself are we providing products, selling services, sure but what are we doing with the situation.

A significant part of the Internet has become ‘corporate’ as it has been structured, organized and packaged along either infrastructure or business process automation lines.   While not all of the web is that way, the dominant way of thinking about technology has changed the application of the web to business.

The view of IT as technology applied to automating, structuring and managing business processes via applications and operations has dominated our thinking for the past 30 years – making technology and IT synonymous from a business and operational perspective.  We assess new and emerging technologies based on their progression from raw ideas and machine capabilities into a set of structure solutions that allow anyone with the resources to reach the plateau of productivity.

New technologies like mobility, cloud, analytics and social challenge this view.  These are generative technologies, like the PC or Internet they provide the basis for creating new solutions and innovation.  They are a base set of technologies for amplifying the enterprise, changing its external relationships, how it handles feedback and eliminates distortions internally and within its value proposition. These Technologies can include IT, but they can also go beyond our traditional notions and concepts of information technology.

How?

Well through a view of Technology as a means to open markets, attract customers, retain their attention, change their behavior, participate in value creation etc.  Mobility, cloud, analytics, social and the new range of technologies can do more than manage predetermined, prescriptive back office business processes.  They can bring information, access, context, values, behavior and a range of other things together to change the meaning of products, services, and work rather than just changing the way people work.

That view is emerging, but it is not from IT, it is from business leaders who are Technology Savvy.  The difference is important to consider.  Technology Savvy executives see technology as a means to create an external outcome, one in the marketplace, with the customers, within the offerings etc.  These leaders are concerned with behavior, choice, context, engagement, attention, motivation, etc.   They not IT Savvy in the traditional sense, as they are less concerned with internal operations, the limitations of legacy, etc.  Notice the distinction between Technology and IT?

By now you are saying that a business needs both Technology and IT savvy and you are right.  After all the innovations and excitement generated in the front office needs to be delivered in the processes and hard work at the back.  You see this right now in discussions around mobility as people are looking for standard solutions to ‘manage’ mobility, control it, integrate it, operationalize it – put a fence around it even though we are just beginning to understand the free range of innovation surrounding it.  That’s not a criticism of the need for emerging technology to mature, but it is an observation that we often want our Technology to grow up into IT solutions too fast.

The realities of the back office do not negate the differences emerging between Technology and IT.  If it does, then the promise associated with mobility, analytics, cloud, social, etc. will falter. They will be come new ways to do the same old stuff.  They will focus on a different approach to automating business processes rather than creating new levels of innovation, value and advancement.

The alternative is to think about Technology as including but being broader than IT.  That view keeps the door open to the generative possibilities of current and future emerging technologies.  It keeps the focus on how technology changes the business externally, rather than automating and integrating internally.  It creates a path for current IT professionals to do more than fit new code, devices and computing into old paradigms.

It provides a way to think of how Technology Amplifies the Enterprise.

Related Posts:

Why the back office may never understand the front office

The future of the CIO lies in addressing issues no one else is thinking about

The structures required for supporting the next generation enterprise and CIO

What should we call IT in the future?

Executives reading these articles could understandably equate social media with unrest, a lack of control, instability and mob rule.  Is that a wrong way to look at what has happened in 2011?

Yes, the legitimacy of a technology cannot be determined only by its applications or the behavior of users is wrong.  Social media may have lowered the barriers to organizing legitimate demonstrations or illegal activity, but social media is not the source of either.

People have always and will always find ways to use technology to meet their needs, whatever those needs happen to be.  The printing press, radio, the telephone, cassette tape recorder, fax machine each been applied to challenge authority and create revolution in the past.

Rather than associating social media technology with social unrest, executives should consider the power and potential inherent in capturing the attention of thousands, engaging their interest, coordinating their activities and creating a collaborative experience based on their interests and passions.   What could your organization accomplish if people did more than just come to work, turn in their eight hours and then go home?

Mass collaboration is the term we use to describe what happens when large groups of people come together to accomplish a mutual purpose that creates value.  Social media provides the technical means for mass collaboration and in the case of protest movements in 2011 the ability of thousands to communicate, share, build upon each other’s ideas and take coordinated action.

It takes more than technology to create a mass movement or mass collaboration.  In our study of more than 400 applications of social media for the book The Social Organization, we found that successful firms applying mass collaboration leverage collaborative communities, purpose, technology and new styles of management to tap into the energy and experience of their people.   They need all of this to create meaningful business results including:

• Engaging customers, prospects and associates to learn more about their needs, desires, interests in order and build a shared context for new products, services, processes and offerings.
• Connecting consumers from shelf to seed with farmers to dialogue on food and food safety issues.
• Facilitating customers helping each other to get more value from your products and services
• Coordinating and sharing advice about critical decisions within your organization, increasing your ability to act based on facts and actively enlist people in change processes
• Improving the adoption of health and safety practices to reduce the potential for injury in the workplace.

It is convenient to equate the value and legitimacy of technology on its application.  Based on social media’s recent press coverage, it would seem that no executive in their right mind would welcome much less sponsor these technologies in their company.

Step back and think about what the technology enables in order to understand the potential of social media based mass collaboration.  Mass collaboration, via social media is a technology that creates and sustains meaningful results in your organization where the only unrest is that of your competitors,

Related Posts:

Why social media is not enough to become a ‘social organization.’

Every organization is social, but few are social organizations

Welcome to the Social Organization

Obviously we will see on the good parts, the creativity, an uncompromising attention to detail, concern over the user experience, etc.  We will choose to see how we have stood up to authority, embraced our inner muse and fought against the odds to win all in the light of one of the most influential people in our world.

Seeing the genius of Jobs in us is natural.  It helps us feel and look better.   What I am afraid we might do is gloss over how Jobs, according to Isaacson, brought those values to life: being incredibly rude to people, dismissing their ideas, adopting them as his own, and generally describing everything he saw for the first time as ‘shit’.

I have been known to adopt this form of communication as well as work with others who have the good intentions and the bad manners attributed to Jobs.  My colleagues used to call it ‘D-Bombing’ as I would swoop in on a review of their draft only to find the weak points and tear it apart like it had been hit by a giant bomb.  All with good intentions and a desire to make the work as strong as it could be, but also with consequences.

I forgot about the consequences.  I believed that the results more than compensated for the tactics as people continually demonstrated to themselves and others that they could go beyond what was expected of them to do some truly exceptional work. The only problem was that without that constant prodding and challenge most slipped back into what was comfortable rather than continuing to push the envelope.

The moral, that while you can get great results from challenging people to be and do more, there needs to be other ways to sustain excellence than constant criticism no matter how constructive or well intentioned.

The point of this discussion is that many people are reading Job’s biography and its easy to become like John Scully as they convince themselves that they are like Jobs and all they have to do is adopt his ways.

You are no Steve Jobs.

You are not John Scully.

Be yourself and find your own way to excellence rather than copying that of others, particularly when that path is one that might cause others wonder, “you kiss your mother with that mouth?

Do you have to compromise your values or ideals to get great results?  No.  But you cannot copy your way to that same result, even though it may be easy to read how others have done that.

Be great, seek greatness in others, demand the best from them and yourself, but always be you, as that is the key to authentic leadership.

While there were a few operational glitches, it was the first time at this location, overall the CIOs I spoke with were pleased with the experience, exercised their issues and exchanged their ideas.  CIOs face the need to find new answers to new questions in an increasingly complex set of economic, operational and financial contexts.   Change is on the agenda of the CIO.

Economics and the debit crisis provided an important context to the event, particularly given events in Italy that happened while the symposium was in session.  I will talk more about that at the end of this post.

In years past, CIOs faced a similar tide of change.  This year there is no single type of change that is pervasive across the CIOs.  This makes 2012 different from 2008/2009 where there was change all in the direction of cost control.  CIOs are changing to support growth initiatives in Asia and Latin America.  CIOs are changing in response to new strategies or regulatory requirements.  And yes, CIOs are changing to reduce costs.

While every one recognizes the need to change, the nature, dricection and challenges of that change are increasnlgy company and contextually specific.  In this regard there is no “European” view on IT for CIOs as each faces their own context and challenges.

Change is at the top of the agenda, but unlike 2008 – 2009, when everyone was changing in the same direction — cutting budgets — change comes in many flavors.

Here are a few things that stick with me as I leave Barcelona.

• European firms are going through structural change in response to the structural economic and business challenges.  There is no clear pattern as some are breaking their companies into smaller divisions while others are consolidating and standardizing to save cost.  These changes are not temporary indicating that leadership believes the current conditions are not temporary.

• The existence of fragmented applications, data centers and operations is a particular target as financial conditions have opened the door to deeper change than simply holding the budget line on spending.  Eliminating the results of accretive change is increasing CIO visibility at the board level and creating new conversations with their business peers.

• Mobility is a hot topic and one that appears to be at the peak of expectations in Europe. The discussions I had related to mobility, tablet devices, etc revolved around understanding how they created value in practice rather than in theory.  The CIOs I spoke with were looking for hard and demonstrable facts rather than relying on the novelty of consumer technologies to create value.  Clearly in this area CIOs have a focus on the longer term rather than the quick value of meeting consumer needs.

• Interest in Social Media was strong, particularly from the perspective of how social media works within a company.  CIOs raised questions and comments regarding issues of individual behavior, free speech, expression and how mass collaboration actually works in a company.  CIO questions reflected an understandable degree of guarded optimism skepticism as they wnat to know how it works before putting it into practice.  You can assess your organization’s attitudes toward social media by taking The Social Organization Book’s assessment gartner.com/socialreadiness

• Cloud computing and sourcing showed renewed interest with discussions centering on actions and plans more than concepts or ideas.   It seems that European firms that had previously thought about these issues, dipped their toes into them were looking to take action in 2012.

• CIOs are facing the need to drive transformation programs in order to meet externally defined requirements and regulations.  The level of transformation and structural change driven by EU legislation appeared to be more on CIOs minds this year than previously.  In some cases, EU legislation is requiring industry restructuring, redefining the boundaries of business in Utilities, Law Enforcement and other areas.

Change requires new answers and new actions.  This creates the impression that CIOs and their organizations are more or less the same as they share similar plans and priority.  Such a view is incomplete as the differences between CIOs in general and European CIOs in particular has never been greater.

Look to the questions that CIOs are answering and the differences emerge.  There appear to be three sets of questions facing CIOs all of which can be addressed with similar plans but to very different results.

New Questions / New Opportunities CIOs facing new questions about growth, channel expansion and overseas operations face a future similar to other multi-national companies.  There questions are new questions about to compete in growth markets primarily in Asia and Latin America. These questions revolve around using technology (including IT) to extend enterprise capabilities and raise the customer experience.

Old Questions / New Answers CIOs facie old questions about cost cutting, consolidation, expense reduction.  They plan to use new technologies such as internet-based services to lower their operational costs, mobility to get high value functionality in to the field, and improve operational efficiency.  Theses CIOs are establishing a new argument around IT as a source of productivity.

Old Questions / Old Answers These CIOs face having to dust off their cost cutting plans and repeating the actions they took in 2008 and 2009.  Organizations implementing plans that call for ATB (across the board) cuts of 10, or , 20, or even 40%  fall into this category.  Repeating the past in hope of a different outcome is a sign of weak management and ATB cuts is a potent indicator that leadership needs new questions.

Regardless of the questions you face, the time to act is now.

If your organization has been holding back on spending cuts by budgeting them for year 4 or 5 in hopes of better economic conditions, then you have lost that bet.  2012 is year 4 of that 2008 plan. It is time to make the changes you hoped you could avoid.

Action is required for the simple reason that financial crisis are particularly caustic to an economy.  THey create the illusion that things are temporary, they lead to band-aid approaches to bail-out players at risk, the stifle the need for deep reform.

Inaction leads to ‘muddling through’ which only turns a CRISIS into a CHRONIC CONDITION.  How CIOs re-imagine IT and lead from the front will determining the extent to which IT contributes to that condition.

Please share your thoughts and experiences from Barcelona.

In January Michael Porter and Mark Cramer published “Creating Shared Value” that looked at creating value beyond financial returns.  This month Rosabeth Moss Kanter published “How Great Companies Think Differently?”  Both articles discuss a view of the organization as more than an engine for generating financial returns to shareholders.

Both articles are recommended reading for considering the ways in which business can create value beyond profits and market value.    Creating value requires defining a broader set of values for organizations.  In April of this year, Jeff Cole and myself authored and EXP report entitled “A different theory of the Firm and IT: comprehensive value and capabilities.” In that report, we defined a collection of value that we called comprehensive value shown in the figure below.

Creating comprehensive value does not involve trading one form of value against another. Rather it is about how we design ways of working that achieve positive results in each of these areas. For example, firms creating jobs that build the local skill base and support development of other companies and opportunities. Firms need the capacity to generate these forms of value in order to retain public trust, confidence and support their own economic viability.

Expanding the definition of value has been done before. Consider Henry Ford who decided to pay the exorbitant wage of $5.00 per hour to his workers to attract the best workforce and give them the economic means to buy his cars. Other social-capitalism practitioners like, George F. Johnson created entire communities, provided free healthcare and education all to secure the best workforce. Firms in the future will be judged and judge their success by more than bottom line. The challenge is how?

The challenge facing organizations is not one of how we add a sustainability dimension to our company.  Creating a sustainability ombudsman is no solution to sustainability.  It only provides a paper response for a pervasive issue. Rather it is how we incorporate values that go beyond financial value into our strategies, plans, and recognition of value.  The debate of an organizations role in society is interesting, but the reality is organizations exist, they are real and they are part of the social fabric.  The assumption that organizational success and societal success go hand in hand is true, but that relationship cannot be the only definition.  Creating financial returns for shareholders is not the only societal impact.  An organization’s impact is more than financial.  It is comprehensive and hence the need for comprehensive value.

Shapiro points out that innovation is a well-worn subject and that in many cases those tried and true beliefs about innovation are neither innovative nor effective.  In response Shapiro offers 40 tips some of which confirm but many of which breath new life into innovation thinking and practice.

The book is recommended to individuals and teams who are looking to initiative innovation programs, particularly for the first time, as it gives fresh thinking to the field.  Experienced innovators or students of innovation will find much of the first part of the book familiar and may tend to discount is value.  That would be a mistake as Shapiro effectively bridges the best parts of current innovation practices with new ideas to create new results.

The book presents each of the 40 tips in short and focused descriptions, many with examples that make them easier to understand and deploy.  In addition, Shapiro makes use of illustrations when it matters to help people see the ideas clearly.  This gives the book both an intellectual feel as its stimulates your thinking as well as an actionable and practical side needed to create value from innovation.

Among the better tips I found in the book include:

• Don’t think outside the box; find a better box
• The performance paradox
• Hire people you do not like
• Why pyramids are one of the seven wonders

Other tips are more familiar but provide a comprehensive view of the issues and practices associated with innovation.   The combination creates a new set of ‘proven’ practices that give people a leg up on getting new results from their innovation projects.

Read the whole book, which may sound silly but the information in the introduction, overview and appendices is valuable not filler.

The book is recommended for teams starting innovation projects where these new ideas can have the greatest impact.  Experienced teams will tend to view many of these tips as ‘old ground’ and need to be encouraged to think differently about innovation and how to employ it in your organization.

A favor, if you found this review helpful and have a moment, could you follow this link to the review page at Amazon and vote for this review.  Thanks

Jim Collins extends and deepens the body of knowledge around the fundamentals of success. Great by Choice represents the second half of Collin’s earlier book on company failure – How the Mighty Fall. While that earlier book concentrated on factors that drive failure, this describes the characteristics of sustained success.

This book is classic Collins. Well researched, clearly describes and expertly packaged for executives to incorporate these concepts into their lexicon and thoughts. This book is recommended as the capstone of the study of the fundamentals of great companies.

Great by Choice is a lot like How the Mighty Fall as it’s a short, concise and focused book. About half of it is content and half is appendices, FAQs and methodology – just like HtMF. Put the two together and you get a comprehensive look at modern corporate success.

This is a book for understanding and admiring the factors Collin’s points out as driving superior performance.

The book describes these factors,
but description is not prescription.

This book is not a ‘how to’ book, nor one that provides much action oriented help. It relies on the reader understanding Collins points and then tailoring them to their situation. That places the burden of value on the reader, which is where it should be as greatness is less a recipe than a recommitment to hard work.

Great by Choice contains a set of core concepts that define the major chapters in the book. Here is a short description of each to provide an idea of what is in Great by Choice and how Collins describes the characteristics of companies that have exceptional performance, what Collins calls 10x.

20 Mile March describes the fanatic discipline that leads you to manage for the long term rather than chasing short-term results or the fade. Essentially this is the business version of the classical Greek axiom of balance and discipline.

Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs by being empirically creative by experimenting intelligently everywhere and exploit where you know you are having success. This is more than the idea of ‘failing fast’. It is a definition of innovation based on the combination of creativity, discipline and data.

Leading above the death line describes the productive paranoia that was captured by Andy Grove’s management mantra. This is a business version of the Boy Scout’s principle of ‘Be Prepared.’ This chapter concentrates on the success and practices of preparation and having reserves that enable you to achieve more.

SMaC describes the company’s principles that are Specific, Methodolical and Consistent. This chapter in essence describes the power of common vision, direction and culture. Collins points out that SMaC is one of the more powerful ways to exert control in a dynamic world.

Return on Luck discusses how leaders and laggards face unpredictable positive and negative events. This is perhaps one of the best chapters as it describes how Collins and his team investigated the phenomenon of luck. As expected the conclusion is that luck does not play a guiding factor, rather its how you take advantage of good luck and are prepared (death line) for bad luck.

These concepts are all interrelated and go beyond the book’ s triangle graphic. You cannot do a 20 mile march well without SMAC and both are worth lest without the preparation associated with leading above the death line.

Overall, I recommend Great by Choice for both fan’s of Collins’ work and for people who are new to this discussion. Yes this book is a continuation the prior books, but it does a great job of providing new insight without overly repeating prior points.

Great By Choice to be a good place for people to start. You do not need to read Collin’s other books, but logically this book is the second half of How the Mighty Fall. I would suggest that if you are going to read both that you read HtMF first as you need to fix that first before the ideas in this book will have and effect.

Strengths

The book contains strong ideas that are simple to communicate and easy to mentally think about how they fit with your organization. Its easy to see how they would may your company a 10X performer.

The case descriptions are informative, insightful and illustrative. The cases are well worn: Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Apple, Progressive Insurance and Intel, but well applied.

The use of mountaineering and explorers as non-business based examples will give you the stories to tell around the water cooler.

Challenges

The book provides powerful description of concepts that we already know. Rewriting Collins’ points boil down to the following: have along term vision (20 miles), experiment to innovate (bullets and canon), ‘Be Prepared’ (death line), follow your core (SMaC) and take advantage when possible (Return on Luck)

The companies featured are studied from 1977 to 2002 which was a period of significant change: the internet, oil crisis, stagflation, etc. However, historically economists have dubbed this period part of what they call the great moderation. So while these principles are timeless, they do not account for what has happened and happening now.

There is no treatment of technology in the book. Given that much of the global, collaborative and social world is driven by technology, this is a big omission. It csn also give executives the impression that they do not need to change the way they operate or the elements of the operations to choose to be great.

Personal note: if you found this review helpful, I would appreciate it if you could go to the book’s page on Amazon and vote for it. Thanks.

CIOs and IT executives who came to this year’s symposia taught me many things. It is always an honor to participate in helping to figure out and move forward to the future.

One CIO I spoke with noted a positive tone in this year’s discussions with fellow CIOs.

Positive? But what about the economy? What about the uncertainty? How can there be positive tone among participants? Isn’t it time to be cutting IT costs again? Time to hunker down even deeper in the face of major issues in the global economy?

Yes positive because despite the very real concerns mentioned above, there is a sense of forward movement. A sense that we need to do something because we cannot wait for a recovery and we cannot cut our way to success. This type of pragmatic courage was tangible at this year’s Symposium.

Realizing that you need to move forward begs the question of where to go and how to get there. This year there are new answers to these questions in the form of the first major, broad based, cross supplier set of ideas in technology in the last 10 years.

Mobile, social, cloud, big data, analytics, etc were all prominent at this year’s symposium. These topics were areas for last year as well, but there was a qualitative difference in 2011 as the focus this year was on business application rather than technical explanation. These technologies are going mainstream much faster than people anticipated. The top 10 technologies for this year had a decided application focus.

Interest in the technology companies that are increasingly forming tech oligopolies was intense. Sessions discussing Google, Apple, Oracle, SAP, among others were swamped. Workshops in these areas were oversubscribed and we added new sessions. “Net it out” sessions had people standing in the hallways to listen to the talk.

The buzz at the event was about how it was time to re-imagine IT because its time to re-imagine the enterprise. That mean getting new ideas and capabilities into the marketplace for growth, customer experience and competitiveness.

This is a BOTH AND approach as growth is needed, but vigilance on cost across the organization remains. Pursuing a dual strategy of focused growth innovation initiatives will share the agenda with continually reducing cost, complexity and time.

The old answers to questions of cost, competitiveness and value creation have come and while many remain. The energy is around new answers to new questions not because what we do now is wrong; rather leaders recognize that a change in direction requires application of new ideas. Continuing on the course that helped us survive current global financial crisis is not going to be the path to recovery and growth.

Technology is gaining in importance to every business.

But that does not mean that IT is gaining importance.

Listening and learning from CIOs in Orlando, that message became clear and the need for re-imagination became compelling.

These CIOs are ‘leading to the next level’ and that started in Orlando.

What did you learn?