Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

The practice of accomplishing tasks through collaboration and of solving problems through aggregating knowledge is as old as humanity.

Companies such as Siemens USA, Best Buy, and Sun Microsystems use social media to form powerful online communities. Those communities — through an "amplification effect" — foster innovation and process improvements far more quickly than companies can achieve with traditional improvement mechanisms.

Sun cofounder Bill Joy famously observed that "innovation happens elsewhere" [1]. He went on to observe that no matter how intelligent the innovators in a company, there are far more smart people outside that company.

I’ve always liked to think of myself as somewhat of a techie. I have always had the latest computers, I had e-mail fairly early on, and I was an early adopter of Skype.

This Executive Update, the final in a four-part series,1 is about negotiating an outsourcing contract with a longtime business partner. Unexpectedly, that which has been a relationship built on trust must be converted into an arm's-length, formalized contractual agreement.

Many years ago, I tore a page from a newspaper and framed it (see below).

Who is, and who should be, responsible for carbon management within a corporation? As climate change relentlessly seeps into the public consciousness, and corporations face increasingly widespread and intense pressure to adhere to regulatory requirements and demonstrate their civic virtuosity by contributing to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, the question of where accountability of carbon management should lie has become a subject of growing interest within the C-suite.

Home entertainment is undergoing a revolution. We are in the midst of a multimedia content insurgency fueled by people creating, sharing, and watching video online. There is no longer any need to set your recorder or even wait for a DVD release, since all your favorite programs are online, and at the click of a button, they can be streamed to a TV, computer, or mobile device at your convenience.

At least, we certainly hope this statement is so. There's no question that organizations -- both government and business -- are paying more attention. Compared to a couple of years ago, when "IT governance" didn't appear on most radar screens, this year has seen many clients coming out and looking for improvements.