Image via Wikipedia
Last week’s OpenText’s Purpose-Driven Speakers Series event in DC featured Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution. Michael is always enthusiastic and thought-provoking, and in this talk, he summarized takeaways from 5 of the top Web 2.0 thought leaders. He also provided a set of simple guidelines for leaders to use to move their organizations toward utilizing the transformational potential of Web 2.0 (download slides here) .
First though, in order to talk about organizational strategy, he provided a simple way to define that strategy:
Strategy is language that does work.
He a defined organizational strategy as aligning tactical actions over time, which move the organization toward a goal.
There were a lot of keen observations in the talk and on the slides, but these are the core guidelines, which Michael calls design patterns, to follow:
- Our job is to make YOU succeed – It used to be that great organizations did great things. Now great organizations help customers, members, vendors and the public do great things.
- On ramps and loading docks – Moving ideas and information between people quickly is the key to a modern organization. Accept deeply that most of the smart people in your field work for someone else, and leverage that fact rather than fight it.
- Edge to core – Identify the successful innovators at the edge of your organization or audience, and free them up to continue innovating by moving successful innovations into the core processes of the organization.
- Be self aware about change – Organizations have immune systems and metabolisms — be self-aware about change and how your organization deals with change so that positive change is not slowed or stopped because of bureaucratic turf wars between the old and new ways of accomplishing your mission.
- Focus on your mission – Do not pursue or support innovation for its own sake. It must be about supporting the mission in a cost-effective way and at the same time preserving room for experimentation and innovative thinking.
Probably the overall thing I will remember from this talk are the penguins. You have to go through the slides or video to get this reference, but the point is that there are innovations available today that will transform the way you do business or run your organization. The trick is to figure the optimal innovations you can adopt quickly that will help achieve your mission more effectively. Planning technical and specific actions too far in advance (as most organizations do) will ignore new technologies and innovations that appear almost daily during this new age of constant technology change.
