Dubai What do Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, eBay and Wikipedia have in common? Besides being six of the fastest growing organisations in history and making several of their founders billionaires in less than a decade, they all utilise a new reality of the information age - whoever leverages the most brains wins! Figure out how to do this better than your competition and you win big.
The subtitle of James Surowiecki's best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations is another take on this new strategic weapon. It's no longer sufficient to have just a smart executive team. You need to launch initiatives to access the collective wisdom of your employees, customers, and the broader world around you.
You not only have to understand and apply this theory to your business, you need to start doing it immediately.
Tap intelligence
In past columns I've touched on several approaches to tap into the collective intelligence of your marketplace including the systematic gathering of customer and employee feedback and the use of wikis to capture and organise this information. There is also some innovative new "community" or "networking" technologies that aid in helping your customers connect with and help each other and in the process, help you.
My company recently launched a public wiki devoted to collecting examples of quarterly themes. Within a few days of announcing the website, many of our long standing clients took the time to populate the wiki with past quarterly theme ideas, photos, and detailed write-ups. This, in turn, is now a valuable resource to the rest of our clients which strengthens our market position as a source of tools and ideas for helping executives grow their businesses.
We decided to house our wiki on a large public site called AboutUs.org.
We've also ventured into the community building aspect of our business. Whereas I can see teenagers spending a great deal of time on community websites like Facebook and MySpace, it's been hard for me to imagine our network of 15,000 executives of growth firms taking the time to visit and benefit from a networking site.
In turn, I know there is a tremendous amount of shared experience and talent among these executives if only they could efficiently tap into this reservoir of knowledge.
Spending $15,000, we licensed a system called IntroNetworks - the same system the famous TED conference uses to network their attendees. What their system does is help the people in your network build specific profiles and through the magic of various algorithms, determines who should talk to whom.
Within a week of our IntroNetwork's-supported community, one of the 15,000 executives in our network contacted me to say he might be able to help with a business challenge I personally posted on the network site. And it was someone I didn't even realise was in the network!
We did connect and he was able to help me determine two concrete courses of action.
Verne Harnish is author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and founder and CEO of Gazelles Inc which serves as an outsourced corporate university boasting a faculty of well-known business experts. Gazelles is represented in the Middle East by Dubai-based biz-ability.
