Thierry de Baillon

Most of today’s organizations are powerful productive machines, which were founded and grew up during an era where mass production was the norm, and planning was the course of action. This era is over for good, and social business, or enterprise 2.0, or connected company, or whatever you want to call it (the level at which most people from this field do not want to be tagged with a specific term is amazing) aims at building and providing an actionable business framework for our times ridden with complexity.

To survive in a more and more unpredictable environment, to thrive in economically challenging times, organizations must reinvent themselves at every level. On the internal side, they have to leverage business nimbleness by adopting more modular and networked structures (to become what Dave Gray calls podular companies), and empower the individual creativity and intrapreneurial spirit...

Technology is influencing more than the way we work, it also deeply changes the notion of workplace. As IBM wrote in 2011 in its The new workplace: are you ready? white paper:

“Today’s workplace is a virtual and/or physical environment, characterized by connections, collaboration and user choice, that enables the worker to be more agile and perform activities anywhere, anytime -ultimately creating greater enterprise value”.

Collaboration, as mediated by social software, is on the agenda of every CEO, or should at least be. A widening array of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools, available on almost any device you might think of, allows workers to access resources and knowledge wherever they are, eliminating the necessity to maintain a unified physical workspace. Technology itself is becoming nomad, ubiquitous, pervasive and affordable,...

Business Model Innovation as Wicked Problem

This post is the first of a two-parts article on innovation and social business co-written with Ralph-Christian Ohr (@ralph_ohr) and cross-posted from collaborativeinnovation.org.

We live in an age where emergent technologies continue to have massive effects on business and society. Rising complexity requires companies and economies to cope with increasingly interlocking systems. If we keep on considering systems in a traditional, isolated way, this would lead to a totally locked view of business....

This might look like a holiday postcard, and it in some way is. Summer always offers a great opportunity to switch off, step back and think a bit more critically. One has to admit that while our consumption’s habits are changing at fast pace, as a result of a rabid co-evolutionary race between all the internet-enabled devices and services at our disposal and the new behaviors these services enable, social technologies aren’t yet transforming the way most businesses operate.

Getting from rock to water

We have learnt that this problem is at least as much a cultural (getting the right mindset) as a technological (getting the right tools for the right tasks) problem. But shouldn’t technology by itself be considered under a behavioral angle, as the workplace itself conditions...