Overview: Business

Two Weekly Review posts on the subject of innovation.

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

Part 2 of my second weekly roundup, where the overriding theme is innovation.

5 principles for any organisation seeking to innovate digitally. Most cover the role of management and organisational structure (flat vs hierarchical structures, cross-silo interdisciplinarity, etc.), but the one that resonated most for me was cultural: "...one of the main cultural challenges [to innovation]... focus on optimising current proce…

Great read on intrapreneurs and innovation. Thinking the @bloggingportal reboot probably qualifies ... "When you treat something like it's stupid, you have fun with it, you don't put too much structure around it. You can enjoy different types of success... no one is watching you and there are no expectations... The best thing a startup can d…

A Review of the State-of-the-Art and an Emerging Research Agenda. "This special issue focuses on the relationship between innovation and open data, while the second special issue emphasizes research on open data related to transparency and open data policies. To realize the practical benefits of this transformative practice and to develop theor…

If you're involved in developing strategy, you need to read 'Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy'. Personally I recognise a lot of this, including in myself, although I don't consider myself particularly smart. The key recommendation? "strategy should not be a monoculture ... of high-IQ analytical wizards. Great strategy is aided by diver…

Good advice for me here. "once you've established that heroism is required to hit deadlines ... work will expand to fill the available space ... more and more weekends and late nights are required to meet the expectations you've set yourself on what you and your team can achieve... by doing lots of out-of-hours work you're over-estimating …

Excellent intro to @buffer team's toolkit. Many I'll definitely check out, particularly Sqwiggle "... a video chat tool that helps you stay in touch with your team when you're working remotely. Every few seconds, Sqwiggle takes a screenshot of you so your colleagues can see that you're around, and just by clicking on another person you can join a …

Thoughtful post from @steveology. Reminding me of Rule #2 of "10 things the EU should probably know about social media", but adds to it. "in house staff, or primarily outsource to an agency? ... neither model works very well, but a hybrid works extremely well... The advantage of a comms agency is that their staff work for "a dozen or two comp…

"Influencers come in many forms — celebrities, connectors, thought leaders, aggregators, CEOs and journalists — and need to be identified and targeted based on your vertical market. The following tools are avenues to help you define who you should target as an influencer through 2014 and beyond." - Influencer Marketing Tools That Will Power Yo…

"Employees don't want to be "satisfied" as much as they want to be engaged. What they want most is a great boss who cares about their development, and a company that focuses on and develops their strengths." - Employee Satisfaction Doesn't Matter | LinkedIn

"Internal communications are responsible for engagement, which can enable employees to actively play a part in shaping the values and the type of experience customers have. Engaged employees who have been inspired and experience the vision, values and mission will then be strong advocates as they work and become involved in the brand themselves…

"if you co-create with your consumers, you are more likely to develop something that they want to buy; consumers are far more likely to be advocates and ambassadors for something that they have had a say in developing; the very act of engaging in a process of co-creation will increase consumer loyalty to your brand. Swap the word "employees" fo…

Good insights on combining editorial, programming and visual experts from NPR: "The multimedia crew wanted to make pictures and video that were truly web-native, which required web makers. And our news apps lacked empathy — something we’re so great at on the radio. It’s hard to make people care with a chart. Pictures were the obvious missing piec…

New report ”examines the current state of data journalism... calling for more transparency on how data is collected and used in journalism, anticipating an explosion in news apps as a way of producing information, and ways newsrooms can address security around their data and reporting. " In particular, I love this: "...the advice that newsroom le…

couple of good questions here: "2. What services do we need to provide our clients in order to increase revenues 10 times from our top 25 clients? Package and price multiple services from all service categories ... have upfront conversations with clients allowing them to select services from a menu of items. ... 3. How do we improve retention a…

"technology is the easy part ... cultural and political—those are your two big barriers. And they’re sort of tied together.... ... a lot of people go off the rails ... dictate solutions without any understanding of the on-the-ground realities of the agencies doing the work. " - Learning from New York City’s open-data effort | McKinsey & Company

"there are themes that may be more broadly applicable than scanning the headlines might make you believe.... ... report defines audience development as "the work of expanding our loyal and engaged audience," ... While this is a central role for the newsroom, audience development is the responsibility of every individual... ... another important …

"it is the innovation report which needs to be read cover to cover by anyone whose work includes a digital media component. "

Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…

New post on LinkedIn

The mind boggles ... "perhaps the creepiest outgrowth of cryptocurrency 2.0: distributed autonomous organizations, or DAOs. Based on charters taking the form of code on a peer-to-peer network, these are entities that could automate many of the tasks of a conventional organization with varying levels of human input. For instance, a DAO could act d…

A long, excellent read, with practical tips and tools. More people should read this! "A badly managed meeting can suck away time, energy and money without being productive for anyone. But it is avoidable: Here's what you should and shouldn't do when meeting in a group at work, whether you are leading the meeting or not." - How to Have a Meeting …

"...is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; extending it with web services; and linking it to databases like Freebase."

When planning a social media campaign around user-generated content, first ask yourself how your users see you ... "The initial photo posted by the department was friendly enough: it featured two smiling officers flanking an equally happy member of the public, with a message that asked followers to post pictures with the hashtag for use on the NY…

"Marketers now have a very real option to bring the majority of their media agency work in-house. If agencies want to maintain relevance ... [they need to] break down the silos they’ve spent the last two-plus decades creating.... The silos will come down one way or another. Smart agencies will dismantle them by design; the rest will crumble under…

The bandwagon effect about the plague of social media experts seems to be coming to a close, at least in corporate USA

Some good tools to check out "Some of the exciting new tools for productivity that you can use today include: Quip, Evernote, Box and Box Notes, Dropbox, Slack, Hackpad, Asana, Pixxa Perspective, Haiku Deck, and more below. This list is by no means exhaustive, and new tools are showing up all the time. Some tools take familiar paradigms and piv…

Brian Solis on LinkedIn: "a pattern of best practices ... these pillars represent the cultural capstones that the most innovative companies in the world invest in to stay ahead of the curve." - How to Build a Culture of Innovation Pt. 2: The 12 Pillars of Innovation | LinkedIn