“Alfred North Whitehead, necessity of a doctrine of internal relations for the theory of evolution:

“This material is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modem doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying activity — a substantial activity — expressing itself in achievements of organism.”^[3]

(via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_internal_relations )

“For a brand to come to life with customers, the organization must be internally aligned to deliver the brand promise through the organization’s culture, reward systems, key success activities and structure. In other words, employees must ‘live’ the brand values in their day to day interactions. And, management must demonstrate their commitment to these values through behavior as well as corporate communications, demonstrating sincerity–not just rhetoric.”

Key points:

• Use internal communications effectively to raise employee morale and commitment through the shared beliefs and vision
• Give managers and staff a deeper understanding of the brand promise and the behaviors and values the promise demands – and train them to adapt their behavior
• Enable all employees to understand how their own work processes and responsibilities contribute to delivering the brand promise to customers
• Change company policies, e.g., recruitment, training, rewards, so that the organization is also behaving in line with its brand promise. The cover diagram shows how the alignment process works to deliver strong brand performance. When employees understand and accept that the values are genuine, they align their attitudes and behavior to the brand values. The result is greater satisfaction for both customers and employees, leading to employee and customer preference and loyalty

Source: Aligning Your Organization and Brand for Performance, Interbrand Insights, 2001

Branding from inside out:

• Step 1: Synchronize Your Brand Personality, Values and Corporate Culture
  Your marketing team should be working closely with your Human Resources team to ensure that the common values of your company internally and externally are in sync.
• Step 2: Get Your Employees Behind Your Brand
  Align your criteria for recruiting and rewarding employees with the criteria of the brand value. Look for the right skills and aptitudes that will represent your brand promise effectively.
• Step 3: Reinforce and Repeatedly Explain Brand Values and Behaviors
  Use your internal communication to reinforce and explain the values and behaviors that reflect your brand promise. Continuously do this until they become second nature.

Source: http://marketing.about.com/od/marketingyourbrand/a/internalbrand.htm

via http://rpssg3.psychologie.uni-regensburg.de/index.html

For all men and women out there who really want to be creative I urgently recommend this - even if I believe that you already have to be special minded in order to really understand the ingenuity of the messages between the lines:)…

How to be creative, H.MacLeaod (.pdf)

(Read more…)

“The global economy appears to be facing a serious downturn. The financial slide that began in the US in August with the dislocation of key credit markets and losses linked to sub-prime mortgages is continuing, with worrisome spin-off effects around the globe: soaring oil prices, higher commodity prices (particularly for food), a plunging US dollar and billions lost by banks. The US economy seems about to slide into a recession, which could be contagious. At the same time, investor and consumer confidence is in a downward spiral.”

What impact will this have on the employee loyalty if we face a lack of consumer confidence as general trend in the macroeconomic business? There’s a natural reciprocal and direct dependency from employee - to customer loyalty. And employee loyalty - I claim- is one of the key success factor for the participating and collaborative”employee 2.0″ in a Web 2.0/3.0 context.

“At the top of the list of concerns, as indicated by the vote,

• is lack of coordinated response and leadership (18.5%),
• followed by mismanagement of the current crisis (18.1%),
• broad-based collapse of confidence (16.7%),
• US recession (11%),
• severe global credit crunch (11%),
• rise in energy and commodity prices (7.5%),
• overreaction to the threat of recession (7.5%),
• rise in protectionism (4.4%) and
• greater income inequalities (2.2%).”

Source: 2008 World Economic Brainstorming: Addressing Uncertainty

Reading his predictions for 2008 and this inspired me also to think about my expectation of 2008 –especially regarding to my my favourite topic: how to tap the full advantage of web 2.0 in the enterprise and how to “model” the employee 2.0. I didn’t dare to write my web predictions for 2008 (because the first of my predictions then would be, that I will need to adapt my predictions in march or April at the latest..). Therefore I decided to collect my personal over- & ab-used buzzwords of 2007.

I think the problem with all this terms is: a lot of people – once heard one of these buzzwords - use it in different contexts and different meanings. By simplifying their world they don’t look at the deeper sense of it, and this superficial understanding of the world (term) can viraly build a collective misunderstanding of really important things. And this misunderstanding provokes sometimes a lot of prejudice, which are very difficult to correct afterwards (I could mention here some examples of – how people reacted on the launch of our bliki (blog/wiki) based IntraWeb 2.0…). Another problem seems to be, that only talking about e.g. “dialogue” doesn’t mean, that you already have implemented successfully the strategy behind:).

Overused and abused buzzwords of 2007 (from an internal relation perspective):

2.0-itis
Needs no explanation, right?

Dialogue
There are also people who don’t share the same ideas – but don’t be afraid - transparency and criticism will help you improve the world – if you listen to them and react.

Simplicity
Don’t forget the complexity behind and don’t over-simplify …”as simple as possible, as complex as needed”…

Competitive advantage
Yes, survival of the fittest… but how does is really work? How can you influence the competitive advantage of your company? Yes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts…

Participation & Collaboration
Participation and better collaboration, that’s what we really want: consider it as a long- and not short-term strategy and as one of the main goals of how the employee 2.0 will have to work: intrinsically motivated ;)….

Proactive
When do we stop talking about and start to live it?

Swarm intelligence
Using the intelligence of the mass is one of the most difficult thing to identify: because once it happens – people do not obviously see it as a result of the “swarm”. Kind of “intelligence of the mass” effects happens all the time and are hidden, but very important part of our lives - even we don’t realize it. Often - unfortunately - we see ideas more as a result of the persons who delivers and presents it. And “to enrich one’s own by giving and receiving parts to and from others”, do you remember the new approaches for sharing in the 2.0-age?

Emergent systems & self organization
To be concise: When does a system start to be “emergent” or “self organized”? How could we identify the point when the system changes, when can we start to name it an “emergent system”? And to be honest: how much self organization do we really want or do we “allow”?

Digital natives – immigrants (or millennials or generation c or y)
Once again: Being a digital natives, millennial or whatever is not a question of age, but of openness and digital literacy. I Therefore I prefer to use – even if it sounds very technical and supports the 2.0-itis - the term “employee 2.0”

Change Management
Wikipedia: “is a structured approach to change in individuals, teams, organizations and societies that enables the transition from a current state to a desired future state.“. Sounds nice: my problem is: How can we manage change and follow a structured approach if we often don’t know how the desired future state will be?

”

Similarly, the total amount of “order” in the system is given by:

In which C_D is the “disorder” capacity of the system, which is the entropy of the parts contained in the permitted ensemble, C_I is the “information” capacity of the system, an expression similar to Shannon’s channel capacity, and C_O is the “order” capacity of the system.^[8]“

Quelle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy#Order_and_disorder

“I teorici del caos e della complessità sono interessati a determinare come un apparente disordine possa celare in sé un ordine occulto, o come un sistema ordinato possa essere caratterizzato da un disordine nascosto in profondità. Noi vogliamo esaminare il disordine per quello que è: una mancanza di ordine”

“Una scrivania disordinata può essere un sistema di accesso e di classificazione delle priorità molto efficace.”

“Il pensiero e il lavoro sono imprevedibili, mutevoli e ambigui. Sono disordinati. Perché non dovrebbe esserlo ancha ela vostra scrivania?”

La forza del  disordine, Eric Abrahamson e David H. Freedmann

Auszug aus: “Interaktive Wertschöpfung: Open Innovation, Individualisierung und neue Formen der Arbeitsteilung”

“Eine der größten Herausforderungen ist die soziale Komponente.” “Der Kunde
darf sein Mitwirken nicht als mitwirken, sondern als mitgestalten erleben. Der
Kunde ist ernst zu nehmen und seine Inputs sind stets zu beantworten. Ansonsten
fehlt auf Dauer die Glaubwürdigkeit.” “Künftig geht es darum, eine unbekannte
Masse von Menschen sozial kompetent zu führen. Hier wird ein enormes Geschick
im Umgang mit Menschen gefordert sein. Denn jegliche Ausfälligkeit und
Ungeschicklichkeit schlägt in weitaus höherem Maße als heute auf das
Unternehmen zurück.” (Read more…)

“Looking at a large number of innovation networks, we identified four different role patterns for creators (gurus), communicators (ambassadors), collaborators (expediters), and knowledge experts. The picture below shows the contribution index pattern”

Quelle: http://www.swarmcreativity.net/html/tool_roles.htm