2009 Archives

We need to make significant changes in how we do business. We need a New How. Organizations are increasingly seeing the benefits of enabling collaborative work environments to drive talent engagement, agility and competitiveness by leveraging their collective knowledge-base and cultural framework. Changing a company’s decision-making culture often seems an impossible task. As we accept and fulfill the traditional expectations and limitations of our roles, we get entrenched: we contribute less and our contributions become less meaningful. That might not be a problem in an environment where little is changing, but in today’s volatile and unpredictable environment, companies need to be able to move as fast as the world they serve. And that requires a major paradigm shift in how companies work.

Through The New How, Nilofer shares specifics that drive powerful alignment between our creativity, our people, and our strategies to win. The New How, is a model for organizational change and effectiveness that addresses key challenges companies face during times of transformation. Nilofer will share principles you can take back to your organization and implement to enhance alignment, nurture a collaborative environment, and leverage the talent that is so core to success.

Nilofer has graciously shared a sample chapter from the New How about a concept she developed titled MurderBoarding. You can download a sample chapter HERE from The New How and learn about the concept of MurderBoarding as a means to gaining clarity and facilitating decision-making around core strategies.

“People tend to resist change fiercely when they don’t see what’s in it for them, and MurderBoarding provides a structured way toalign people to a new strategy.”

Listen to the webinar HERE.

The business world has become a place where creativity drives results, and executable ideas are the core of strategic and competitive advantage. But bright, talented, and motivated people cannot jointly create effective strategies until the fundamental enablers of collaboration are in place. Without responsibility-sharing, decision-making, and idea-generation protocols, individual assets may be limited by organizational hierarchy. The new leader of co-creators gains enormous leverage by helping to increase the quality of ideas, speed up decision making, and solve the toughest problems throughout the organization. Collaborative leaders create conditions for their company to outshine the competition by out-thinking them, out-creating them, and out-innovating them repeatedly. If your role is to help leaders and all contributors in the organization learn to collaboratively formulate and execute a winning strategy, this webcast is for you!

Constraints can drive creativity and innovation in the “do more with less” kind of way. But, the truth is, constraints are never fun. Constraints means dealing with tought conversations and tradeoffs between entirely viable options and wanting to optimize results. This sessions provides a framework for making tough choices and safely kill off options, or murder ‘em, so you can do stuff that matters.

Web 2.0 Expo New York

How do you best run your company with the new realities of collaboration and co-creation?

A quick look around makes it obvious that “business as usual” isn’t working.

When inventing their future, companies too often focus on the what: what is the right thing to do, what is the right idea, what is the answer to this problem? The reality is that good ideas alone are no safeguard against the disruptive and fast changing global markets we face, so strategy creation can no longer be defined in terms of mere ideas. Strategy creation must also include the way those ideas are created. And it must do so quickly, enabling organizations to think, make tough choices, and act fast.

Just as Clayton Christensen highlights The Innovator’s Dilemma, we must identify and name The Collaborator’s Dilemma to describe the way we create—or fail to create—strategies that work.

Organizations face three classic dilemmas when creating strategies: the “air sandwich” between executives and others, the chief of answers who creates an information bottleneck, and the fear of driving collective decision-making when aiming for collaboration. This session explains how each of these is fixable if one is willing to reinvent their firm to win.

It’s obvious that “business as usual” isn’t working.

Companies focus on the what: what to do, what’s the right idea, what’s the answer to this problem? Good ideas are no safeguard against disruptive and fast changing global markets so we can no longer define strategy creation in terms of mere ideas. Strategy must include the way ideas are created. And it must do so quickly, enabling organizations to think, make tough choices, and act fast.

Just as Clayton Christensen highlights The Innovator’s Dilemma, we must identify and name The Collaborator’s Dilemma to describe the way we create strategies that work.

Organizations face three classic dilemmas: the “air sandwich” between executives and others, the chief of answers information bottleneck, and the fear of driving collective decision-making when aiming for collaboration. This session explains how to address these if one is willing to reinvent their firm to win.

Nilofer is a sought after global high-tech industry thought leader and trusted strategic advisor for companies such as Adobe, Symantec and VMWare. As Rubicon’s CEO, she has built a distinguished team of fellow strategists, who collaborate with a wide range of Silicon Valley executives at client firms such as Autodesk, Cogito, Hewlett-Packard, Pinnacle, Riverside, SAP, VA Software and others. Rubicon’s proprietary methodology continuously delivers significant material results to clients, driving revenue growth, market share-price and profits.

More information

During Web 2.0 Expo, five startups give their customer pitches (not their VC pitches) and get feedback. They come prepared to pitch their product as if they’re meeting a potential customer at a cocktail party. They get two minutes and no slides. The panel and the attendees then give each company feedback. It’s fun, but not competitive, so there’s no judging or ranking.

On Thursday, February 26th, Nilofer Merchant will speak at The Synergos Series in Palo Alto. The Synergos Series is a monthly thought-leadership sponsored by The Hayden Group, a marketing and creative services firm specializing in product launches and marketing facelifts. The Synergos Series features Bay Area business leaders and authors in an intimate, salon setting. The Synergos Series is free to invited guests.

Niolofer will talk about Reinvention as an Economic Necessity. With businesses failing all around us, we can see that “business as usual” isn’t working. We not only need new strategies to win, we need new approaches to strategy. Strategy CANNOT simply be some abstract mind-centric process that a few elite people do. Instead, it’s a highly inclusive and practical activity for finding and optimizing the best ideas for reinventing oneself, one’s team and one’s company successfully. If you are interested in attending Nilofer’s February 26th talk, email victoria@thehaydengroup.com to RSVP and get directions.