Will all that’s been going on lately (teaching class, presentations, conferences, client discussions) I’m a little behind on my reading. Good thing Google Reader keeps stuff around for me. Two pieces from the Harvard Business Review website (AP Style says that’s OK now) bear a close read, one on the use of Twitter-type tools for internal communications, and the other summarizes several new perspectives on business strategy.
Tools such as Yammer have brought Twitter capabilities (microblogging) into the enterprise. Authors Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd cover the cases of LG Electronics and Meredith Corporation in using Yammer and Socialtext to reduce the lengthy process of designing training programs and communicate speedily and across silos, respectively. Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity is worth your time.
In Strategy By Any Other Name, Walter Kiechel notes that speakers who usually discuss business strategy have been shoved aside by economists and journalists talking about the global financial crisis. He finds, however, that strategy has just gone a bit underground — it’s showing up “all over the place in contemporary management literature, albeit sometimes under different cover.”
Kiechel covers a lot of ground, with links to many resources. One that looks particularly interesting is The Power of Pull, by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. Their core thinking is that the old economy “was based on ‘push,’ forecasting what would be needed or what would sell and then mustering resources to fulfill that demand. The new world is one of ‘pull’ — find people and resources exactly when you need them, attract them to you even before you know they exist, and then pull the best from within them, and yourself, to achieve your potential.”
Certainly Hagel and Brown’s idea has history — we communicators have been trying to puzzle out the push vs. pull argument for a really long time (at least as long as I’ve been in this career, anyway.) I’m eager to add the book to my summer reading list.
In the meantime, check these two pieces out — and if you’re not reading HBR in some form, get on it.
Tags: communication experts, communication methods, communication vehicles, discuss, effective communication, internal communication, Media Relations, PR measurement, Research, Twitter
microblogging is really useful when you want to broadcast short updates. i am still leaning towards traditional blogging.’”-