We could all benefit from this level of energy and commitment
With a hat tip to Espen for finding and sharing this.
Month: November 2008
Social media lessons from the Obama campaign
[cross posted at FAST Forward]
The Obama campaign was innovative on a number of dimensions, particularly with the use of social media and the effective leverage of committed volunteers. There’s been some good reporting that captures the ground truth of what the campaign actually did and some early efforts to make sense out of these facts in a way that offers lessons for those of us interested in their relevance to broader organizational and enterprise needs.
Use of social media
- The Machinery of Hope : Rolling Stone – A substantial article analyzing the volunteer organization in the Obama campaign and the role of social media tools
- BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet key to Obama victories – A fairly substantial report on the Obama campaign’s effective use of the Internet during the primary season
- Inside Obama s Surging Net-Roots Campaign – Analysis and commentary of the Obama campaign’s use of the internet as an organizing and fund-raising tool
- Members vs. Customers: How the Obama and Clinton Online Campaigns Differ – Harvard Business Online s Conversation Starter – An analysis of the differing approaches to enlisting supporters by the Obama and Clinton campaigns during primary season. Turns an eye toward the differing uses of supporting technology and how those differences reflected differing assumptions and goals about the role of supporters
- The Media Equation – How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks Power – NYTimes.com – An excellent overview piece of reporting on how the Obama campaign made effective use of social media tools and thinking.
Effective use of engaged volunteers
- Obama Opens the GOTV Firehose | The Next Right – Analysis of the organizing principles and strategies behind the Obama campaign’s ground organization
- Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort – A fairly detailed analysis of the organizing principles behind how the Obama campaign built its volunteer organization
- Zack Exley: The New Organizers, Part 1: What s really behind Obama s ground game – A case study of the principles and approach behind the ground level volunteer organization in the Obama campaign. Some good insights into how to take full advantage of a motivated volunteer force with the right organizing principles and the right supporting technology
Lessons for organizational design and strategy
- Obama s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators – Umair Haque – Umair Haque is one of the most insightful analysts and interpreters of how new technologies are influencing and shaping organizational design choices. Here he turns his eye on the lessons available in the success of the Obama campaign.
- Barack Obama s Edge-Based Organization – John Sviokla – An early analysis of some of the broader lessons for organizations and organizational design that can be drawn from the Obama campaign
JP Rangaswami on KM … “Clear, Transparent, Searchable, Archivable, Retrievable”
This has been lurking in my RSS aggregator for quite a while, courtesy of Jon Husband. There is really a lot of highly condensed insight in this post.
Thanks to JP Rangaswami for distilling social computing (in the context of work) to an essence.
From his post “Facebook and the Enterprise, Part 5: Knowledge Management“.
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“More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.”
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Via Dave Pollard via Nancy White
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JP Rangaswami on KM Clear, Transparent, Searchable, Archivable, Retrievable
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Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:08:06 GMT
Was being a fast follower ever a viable strategic option?
[cross posted at FAST Forward blog]
How often do you run across organizations that claim they intend to be “fast followers” when it comes to some dimension of strategy and innovation? Maybe I’m simply cranky because it’s Monday, but is there any way to make sense of such an approach in operational terms? The image of “fast follower” is intended to evoke a NASCAR driver drafting behind the leader, carefully waiting for the right moment to streak past and across the finish line. It’s deeply rooted in a notion that strategic success is a function of execution.
Any fast following strategy assumes learning from the leaders as a necessary first step. If you actually believe that the strategy can work, you need to be operating with something along the lines of the following as a theory of learning over time:
In this model, watching a first mover and waiting allows you to start your learning at a higher level and sometime later pass the first mover as their learning process peaks and levels off or slows down. I have two problems with this model. First, it assumes that the lessons learned by our first mover are easily observable and quickly transferable. Second, it still denigrates learning as an ongoing requirement. In this model, learning only needs to happen long enough to figure out the new strategic game and we get back to execution as the only relevant differentiator. It encourages you to undervalue and under invest in learning as a strategic competence.
I suspect that strategic learning is much more likely to follow a logistics curve of some sort. Early learning is relatively slow, followed by a period a very rapid learning, and ultimately a leveling off. If you accept that model of learning, then a fast follower strategy becomes even more suspect. In that environment, first mover advantages are likely to be more pronounced, with something like the following representing that situation:
At this point, being early in my own learning process, I mostly have more questions, not answers. Among them, in no particular order, are:
- What’s the relative value of competitive secrecy vs. the internal organizational drag on learning imposed by attempts to preserve secrecy?
- What can you do to shorten the slow ramp stage of learning?
- Under what circumstances would fast following remain a viable strategy? Are those circumstances strategically interesting?
- How do shortening learning cycles alter this argument?
Bloglines claiming post
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