If your business is knowledge: do you value knowledge creation and sharing?

If your business is about knowledge (reminder: knowledge is not information), how do you motivate people to create and share your most valuable asset?

Let’s have a look at the typically ‘knowledge’ company: A strategic consultancy firm. Their main asset is the knowledge and experience that their consultants possess (of course along with the capacities to translate these to a specific business or case,…).

If you work in such a firm, you no doubt receive a bonus when the companies numbers go up, you definitely receive a surplus when you bring in a new client and you even get an extra paycheck when you bring in a new recruit (hey, that is knowledge also).

The question is: do you get an incentive to create or share knowledge?

Do you receive recognition when creating a white paper, host a knowledge session during lunch for the new arrivals on the project, share the status of the project, give everybody a heads up on the added value you bring to a specific customer,…?

There are plenty of tools out there to share the knowledge, but few organization value the importance of knowledge sharing and the effort that goes into creating and sharing it.

If knowledge is your main asset, you should make sure your employees go beyond limits in creating, sharing and defending that asset!

(Full disclosure: Filip is working for Sodexo Web Motivation center and provides solutions for companies that want to work around motivation / incentive / recognition).

Digital marketing: stop trying.

The times when you should ‘do some tests’ with digital marketing are over. I would not be surprised if a lot of old-school marketing managers do think: ‘yeah-yeah, let those young people believe that it will work, we know better’.
But now, also McKinsey is saying so: in an easy readable article, they guide you through four ways to get more value from digital marketing.

“To talk directly to the ones in charge: Companies that make the deep strategic, organizational, and operational shifts required to become effective digital marketers can become more agile, more productive, and accelerate revenue growth.”

Auch!

Click here to read the full article (login required).

Change your management.

Change management is a relevant field of expertise for every professional, be it as a self-employed entrepreneur or as a CEO of a large company. Whatever your personal field of knowledge, learning the basic of change is learning how to cope with people (as employee, as co-worker, as customer,…).

Luc Galoppin put together this e-book that gives you a quick introduction and makes you want to digg in deeper.

20 Shortcuts On Organizational Change Management

View more documents from Luc Galoppin.

Team work

Teams today should be fast paced (even if they are not on the same location), your team members get an e-mail overload, you need to keep track of the overall progress. With old tools and way of working, you are bound to have no time left to actually get the job done. New tools and ways of working can help you and your team in saving a lot of time.

Challenge:

Declutter your inbox.
Define, follow up (and change) on priorities becomes virtually impossible.
Exchange information takes a lot of time, information gets scattered.
Teams get frustrated because they do double work, don’t find the information they need,…

Value:

Work social = in parallel.
Streamline processes based on best practices and simple tools.
Get your project/product/… out much quicker and reduce drastically your time to market.

Business casing & piloting.

Resources are becoming more scarce every day. The art of business casing helps you in convincing yourself and your boss that you will invest in the right things. At JOINED!, we see business casing as a first step in a 2-step process. We are truly convinced that a business case is a gatekeeper, and should always be followed by a pilot = actually do / test / ship something.

Challenge:

Cloud of ideas: which one to choose?
How to actually demonstrate the value of an idea/solution/concept/product?
Company not used to agile way of working.

Value:

Business case framework.
Methodology for rapid development.
Agile ideas & tools to help teams to get things done.

Marketing/Strategic Plan

Helping you in doing the right things is about planning. At JOINED!, we don’t believe in 3 years plan’s. They are for accountants and people who believe the world does not change. With markets, employees,… changing continuously and new and innovative solutions every day, planning is more effective on the medium term (6-12 months). But we know the drill: you are stuck in the day to day urgencies.

Challenge:

Set a framework for all your day to day decisions (make sure you keep doing the right things).
Enable sharing of this framework to the rest of the organisation.
Identify and select the best market opportunities.
Plan your approach and go to market.

Value:

Get your team in the strategic mindset.
Align them for quick goal-setting.
Development of the marketing plan.
Define go-to-market framework.

Leverage team knowledge

There is a lot of knowledge in your sales team. The issue most of the time is that it is in the individual heads of the sales persons. With social tools, the right mindset and good community management, you can unlock the real value of this information.

Challenge:

Find a way to share the information that individual sales people have.
Enable marketing to quickly share market and competition information.
Leverage the wisdom of the internal crowd to come up with solutions for new challenges in the market, best practices,…

Value:

Selection and setup of internal social communication tool (Yammer in this case).
Roll out plan
Animation

Mental note for the new year

Never use your own customer behavior to predict market reactions… but be sure to check your marketing strategy with yourself.
Listen to the advice of other people, but make sure you have an idea yourself.
Limit asking “why?”, ask more “how?”.
Always keep exploring new ways of communication, because your customers will do as well.
When in doubt, just go for it.

Happy 2010!

Ps: In case you forget a present for someone, maybe go for a brand new planner.

www.joined.be/blog/agenda

A new year, A new agenda/planner/diary, A new design!

After using all kinds of offline and online tools to keep my life (both professional and personal) a little bit less chaotic, I decided it was time to make up my own agenda layout.

Apart from the urge to create something random, the non-fit between the existing agenda-solutions and my specific needs pushed me into it 😉

I found out that I love to have something you can touch. And after my iPod touch falling down to hard and loosing all the information, that ’touch’ part needed to be paper. I love Moleskine agendas, but the thing is: they are too simple.
On the other hand, you have very specific tools like the superb printable CEO series, but they are not really day to day planning tools for everybody.

So I designed a tool that focuses on personal and professional stuff, that lets you be creative and is sociable (build around people). First version for this year, so feel free to check it out, share your idea’s or order it right now!

All info: www.joined.be/blog/agenda

Choice

People like choice.

Or at least, they like the illusion of choice. They like choice not because it makes them happy. As a matter of fact, choice does not only make people unhappy, it is also highly ineffective. Choices involves choosing. And choosing takes time. Time to learn to know the contents of the different options, time to compare the characteristics and make a decision. Forget about time-efficiency.

Choice also makes people unhappy because of the ‘choosing is loosing’ paradigm. Most people are just not good at leaving things behind, let opportunities slip by or just leave a product in the shop.

Then why do we live in world that acts as if choice is a necessity?

Could it be that people just need to rationalize their choice? They can argument why they choose to buy product X in a rational way: By pointing out it is better that product Y (or cheaper, or faster, or more shining or …). By doing this they avoid to have to explain their most recent buy in light of their own needs and behavior. Maybe you just don’t need that product or service…

So maybe it is not that odd that companies create choice in their own product portfolio.

But what if you take that choice away, would customers really miss it?

What do you think?