News.
In Context newsletter October 2010
In Context Update
Over the past few weeks we’ve been engaging with organisational strategy on various levels – not only within our own environment, but predominantly in dealing with the future strategies of some of our clients. As they shape their strategies through facilitated discussion and prepare business plans for 2011-12, we are again surprised how difficult it can be for some to craft meaningful stories about their organisation’s future.
In preparation for one of these sessions we revisited the Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy. And yes, we agree – if you read nothing else on strategy, read this.
In the very first article, What is Strategy?, Michael E. Porter emphasises the three key principles that underlies strategic positioning:
1. Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.
2. Strategy requires you to make trade-offs in competing—to choose what not to do.
3. Strategy involves creating “fit” among a company’s activities.
As the calendar year races to an end we find ourselves (and our clients) making more and more trade-offs. Not easy, but necessary. As Porter puts it: “Trade-offs are essential to strategy. They create the need for choice and purposefully limit what a company offers.” So if you find yourself in this position know it is necessary. And let us know if you need help – we facilitate strategic discussions, assist with research and train your teams to write their stories. Contact us on .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) should you require more information.
Featured course
Creating change champions: Change through Social Networks
Course description:
This workshop provides guidelines on selecting, directing and assisting champions to orchestrate desired change.
Outcomes:
By the end of the workshop you should:
• understand the principles of influence through connectedness
• have an outline of the knowledge and tools the champions will need to orchestrate the change process
• methods for maintaining ongoing support for and between the champions
Who should attend?
CEOs/MDs, senior leaders, organisational development practitioners
Length of course:
Two days
If this sounds perfect for someone in your team, email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Our bookshelf
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
The Big Short gives a different take on the 2007-08 credit crisis. Lewis chronicles how a handful of investment managers detected early on the growing bubble in the mortgage bond market and made fortunes betting against it. He explains in plain language how the industry obscured credit risk by packaging and repackaging low-quality subprime mortgages into complicated securities that could receive high credit ratings in a process he calls the financial alchemy equivalent of turning lead into gold. He says investors then looked at little more than the ratings as they bought billions of dollars’ worth of these supposedly safe bonds. Lewis turns the crisis into a true financial thriller that screams of Wall Street’s greed, recklessness, deceit, incompetence, and hubris.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is available from kalahari.net.
Industry Update
The link between communications in the online and offline space
The perception of online as a lonely place that isolates people from the rest of society, and that it couldn’t possibly facilitate the development of any meaningful offline connections, has become a thing of the past for many, with our growing obsession with updating our Facebook or Twitter statuses; loading our most recent photos; plotting our whereabouts on Foursquare; and embracing the true meaning of ‘social networking’. Businesses, too, are jumping on the bandwagon to incorporate online activity into their marketing and communication strategies.
With this embracing of online and social media, however, has also come growth in understanding the importance of developing and maintaining offline connections, and the realisation that online social networking has the potential to help us develop these with people we may not have had the opportunity to meet in the past, but who share similar interests to us. As such, online has not created an anti-social society, but rather, a hyper-social one.
Springwise refers to this trend as ‘mass mingling’, and understands it as “technology driving people to connect and meet up with others in the ‘real world’.” But why the interest in actively searching for; connecting with; and staying in touch with likeminded others in the virtual world, which then transcends into the offline world?
Trendwatching has come up with several reasons driving this move toward ‘mass mingling’ .
• Firstly, ‘people love to connect’, and this has become easier thanks to new technology.
• Secondly, people love the ‘real world’, and while the rise of the online world remains a significant trend, other trends such as ‘experience economy’ and ‘living the live’, point to our need to have tangible experiences and relationships with others in an offline space.
• Thirdly, there’s now an all-encompassing ‘information layer’ on top of ‘real-world daily life’, especially with mobile and location-based technology, which turns ‘connecting’ into a 24/7, ‘on the go’ practice. It is therefore easy to turn an online conversation into an offline meeting.
Moving on from the personal movement from online to offline, businesses and PR professional are also seeing merit in this move, and are encouraging their clients and consumers that have traditionally followed them in an online environment, to now gather offline.
Trendwatching predicts that meet-ups of strangers; ‘mobs’; and crowds with similar interests or for similar causes is likely to continue, and ironically, those who have criticised the online space as a place of social isolation may change their tune to lamenting the loss of solitude due to 24/7 ‘connecting activities’.
Article shortened due to space.
Author: Kerryn Le Cordeur. Source: http://www.publicityupdate.co.za/default.aspx?IDStory=2858