Jackson Hull – Managing in Information-Intensive Companies

Reporting Strategy: Empower Your Company From The Inside

This is a succinct article that describes the importance of a company’s social strategy. The article suggests that a company must have an “organized, tailored, and calculated social media reporting approach.” Having such a process impacts the way decisions are made within the enterprise.

They argue that a reporting structure — which I presume is an IT tool to scour the social web for and return information about a company’s products — is the best way for organizations building products to eliminate some market segment and product roadmap guesswork, make better marketing decisions and “surfacing pain points for your customers that are happening with your products, services and overall brand.”

Do you think this is an insurmountable task? Boiling down the chatter into an actionable set of reports?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/feeds/reporting-strategy-empower-your-company-from-the-inside/3098Article

The CEO’s Innovation Nightmare

This article from Business Week highlights many of the challenges to rebuilding a business for innovation that we discussed in class. It provides advise to a turnaround CEO… much of the points align with our conclusions from class. Namely:

Recruit Believers – As with Intuit case, the change required fresh talent with innovative thinking;
Hire Objective Senior Managers – creating the right metrics and accountability measures is critical (as we saw in Donnelly);
Fail Forward – encourage risk-taking; and,
Control the Framing – this is an interesting idea that we did not discuss: “If you control the language, you control the expectations.”

I think these points are warranted, even if unsubstantiated with real-life examples in the article. I liked this perspective, because it is resonates with many of the themes we have discussed in class.

The article ends with some practical advise about immovable innovation obstacles — quit! What do you think about the idea of quitting when the going gets tough in innovation?