Web 2.0 Expo speech May 6, 2010 by Charlene Li entitled, "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform How You Lead". Learn more at open-leadership.com
Having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control, while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals
Best Buy set up an internal community for their front line employees. They all wear blue shirts in the stores, so they call the site “blue shirt nation”. In this example, a camera case was sent to the store and it just didn’t look right. Within two hours, someone had come into the community and seen the post. It happened to be the person who designed the case. She said that she would go back and make sure that all of the right cases got sent to the right stores. How long do you think it would have taken that floor manager to figure out that he had been sent the wrong case? Probably weeks. But with Blue Shirt Nation, employees are solving problems together.
Key take aways:Relationship was strongCould overcome small transgressions, mistakes are forgiven
The key is to focus on the relationships and connections that are enabled, not the technologies. Think about the kind of relationship that you want. Do you want it to be short term and transaction, or long-term and intimate?To help you think about this, I have a simple idea.
Starbucks has a site where people can make suggestions on how they should improve. The key difference is that the suggestions are public, and people can vote for their favorite suggestions. Here’s an example of automatic ordering. Note that there is a status update here “Under Review”.