John Todor

Collaboration and Social Business are powerful concept with huge potential but realizing this potential is far from business-as-usual. Both traditional business and social business evangelists must challenge their assumptions—and then doing something different.

The rise of the social web now sets the context for business, cannot be ignored. Customers rely on it to make decisions and they have expectations of the companies with which they do business. Companies of all sizes have launched initiatives with a goal to foster greater co-operation, collaboration and more meaningful relationships inside their companies and with customers.

It is safe to say that the results are mixed. We are in a transitional period, like the wash between two waves—the forces of the old and new waves are at work and impacting results.

One of the deep-seated assumptions that undermine collaboration initiatives is the belief that people are motivated to act in...

Growing complexity in business is a problem! An IBM study reported that the vast majority of business leaders recognize increasing complexity as one of their top business challenges. Yet, less than half of these leaders believe their organizations are capable of handling it.

According Ron Ashenas, author of Simply Effective, there are ways you can reduce it in your company.

A lot of the complexity is externally imposed. Whether we run a one-person shop or work in a large enterprise we are all confronted with complexity everyday. Too much information, too much new stuff we don’t understand, too little time and so on. Even in a one-person shop, decisions like choosing a...

The 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer is out and contains some distressing news for businesses in the USA and UK. There are, however, some insights on how a company can turn this situation into an opportunity.

Trust in business in the United States and United Kingdom dropped so dramatically over the past year that both are now considered “distruster” nations. Scary, they rank just above Russia at the bottom of the scale. Interestingly, the emerging economies who are coming out of the recession ahead of the USA and the UK, all rank near the top as “Truster” nations.

The lack of trust cost businesses money.

Without trust, things cost more, take more time, and exert more strain on an organization. Stakeholders will double-check every word you say before cooperating with you. They’ll make almost any task more ponderous and exhausting. (...

Yesterday, Axel Shultze, Chris Carfi and I had the privilege to open the Social Business Executive Summit. I hope you had a chance to listen in and plan to catch more of the excellent panels today and tomorrow.

Time was short so we didn’t get a chance to pull together the ideas that we individually presented. Here are a few of my thoughts.

During my presentation I made the point that learning must now be an integral part of work – the role each person performs within their organization and, in fact, the larger business ecosystem. Traditionally, learning in organizations has been learning to do a job, task or to use technology. This is explicit learning. When things change quickly and in unforeseen directions as they do now, organization must adapt. However, learning tasks or jobs most often has the opposite...