Tag Archives: enterprise collaboration

Manage Your Dependence

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It’s not enough that you are absolutely fantastic.  Success today is largely dependent on how well you manage your ecosystem.

(Corollary: And it is impossible for you to innovate and succeed all alone.)

This seems to be the main theme of ‘The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation’, an interesting book that I chanced upon through Forbes.

I especially liked the term ‘managing your dependence’.  It succinctly covers all kind of partnerships that an enterprise has to forge and nurture to be successful – employees, customers, vendors, channel partners and others.

Needless to say, this is a subject close to my heart.  After all, at KineticGlue, we are enabling our customers just do this – ‘manage their dependence’.

The book illustrates several examples of great successes – enterprises that have managed their ecosystem well and failures – brands/ products that, despite being radically innovative, failed, because they did a poor job of managing their ecosystem.   It looks like an interesting read!

The Virtual Tree House

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I have been reading these amazing stories from the Red Frog founder Joe Reynolds, about giving unlimited vacation days to employees and building a tree house for them right in their office.  These are great strategies to retain great talent and attract new talent.

Though the thought and technique is new and refreshing, the idea is inherently the old, well-known one:  happy employees are productive employees.  Ensure that your employees are happy.  And Joe’s strategies only indicate that its not always money that keeps employees happy. [By the way, Red Frog is a success story of a company that rocketed from $5000 to $45 million.  So these things do work!]

The unlimited vacation days policy is really interesting.  The underlying idea is to provide enough flexibility to employees so that they are not constrained by a 9 to 5 office schedule, and yet remain productive.  Going by Joe’s blogs, such flexibility only enables employees to be more productive than if they were doing a 9 to 5 job in their office.

If this is the idea, why not consider an Enterprise Collaboration Platform?  A collaboration platform could, perhaps, be the best way to incentivize employees to be more productive.  You show that you trust that they will be responsible enough to accomplish their work and are giving them freedom to use their time as they wish to use it.   This doesn’t mean you lose track of who’s doing what, when.

And as Joe says, people are really responsible and do not misuse such provisions for freedom.  This has been our experience with our customers as well.  So, in all, a social business platform could be the virtual tree house that you build for your employees.  And what’s more, your employees can be seen happily going about their work in this tree house, even when they are not physically present in their offices.