How to Keep Ahead of Sustainability's Twists and Turns | SUSTAINABILITY, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE FUTURE OF VALUE

Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Value with Eric Lowitt

I want you to close your eyes for a minute. Think of the word "sustainability." What images come to mind? Trees, grass. Perhaps the color green? Now think about sustainability and your business. What issues are most pertinent to your organization's performance?

Maybe you considered risks. Or opportunities. Perchance did you think about issues of social equality? Of child labor or anti-corruption? Or how your organization could sharpen its competitive advantages by working more closely with local communities?

Over the next five to 10 years a certain breed of organizations will complete an impressive double play: They will both embrace sustainability deeper and outperform financially their peers. If we had the benefit of racing ahead a half-decade to reflect on these organizations' successes, we'd marvel at their ability to evolve with, if not slightly ahead, of sustainability's twists and turns.

And what would these twists and turns be? While no one has the benefit of a crystal ball that sees the future in HD, the lack of such a crystal ball should not hold one back from making educated guesses either. Here are three changes to your conception of sustainability that your organization should consider today in order to increase the likelihood that it will continue to succeed over the next five to 10 years.

1. The Sustainability Movement within industry will morph into the Restorability Movement. This will be a sign of the Movement's success.

Conventional wisdom suggests industry is working through the third wave of environmental and social sustainability. The first wave occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. The next occurred around 1990. Both of these waves failed to lead to lasting change in corporate settings. Companies did not connect sustainability with core business activities and values during the previous two waves.

The current wave will be different. Today informed companies are investing financial and human capital to integrate sustainability into their DNA. In the future, talking about one's sustainability initiatives will seem out of step with the market as a whole. As an analogy, consider how often companies tout their quality levels these days. Or their internet capabilities. Not often, if at all. Organizations by and large have integrated such capabilities into their DNA. So it will be with sustainability.

As the Sustainability Movement fades, a new wave of environmental and social goals will emerge. Progressive organizations will shift their focus from a stance of 'Do less harm' to 'Do more good.' This shift will be typified as the Restorability Movement. Many organizations have found ways to earn economic returns from reducing their environmental impact, creative organizations will find ways to make money by restoring ecosystems to pre-industrial conditions.

2. The Sustainability Movement will combine with previous imperatives, such as globalization and the internet. New distinctive capabilities will emerge as a result.

A business imperative is a new circumstance in the economic environment that requires radical changes in a business's operations at every level. If changes are not made, the business cannot continue to create value consistent with previous levels; in extreme cases, the business cannot survive. Between the end of WWII and the dawn of this third wave of sustainability, industry faced four imperatives: quality, business process reengineering, globalization, and the dot-com.

Each imperative impacted the way business created value. Value first migrated to companies with high product quality levels, then businesses with quick turnaround times and high service levels, then global reach, and eventually multiple distribution channels. Some companies made adjustments early; others took time to catch up to these early adopters. Eventually the hotness of each imperative cooled. Left in their stead were a set of new capabilities.

Today many of these capabilities are intertwining to both complicate and simplify industry's sustainability response. For example, on the complicating side of the equation, a corporate misstep in a distant region of the globe can quickly become viral news via social media.

Companies that will succeed tomorrow will find ways to combine sustainability capabilities with capabilities developed in response to previous imperatives. Some companies are already responding this way. GE, for instance, is using social media to crowdsource smart grid innovations from around the world. The ability to intertwine newer capabilities will emerge as a lever of competitive differentiation and ultimately outperformance of peers.

3. The basis of industry competition will shift from company versus company to corporate network versus corporate network.

The Sustainability Movement is leading to the adoption of multi-stakeholder approaches to address environmental and social challenges. Several companies have developed venture arms to fund and guide investments in renewable energy. Given the scale and unique local challenges of such investments, the more successful venture organizations have partnered with industry, private equity, and local community entities to achieve their investment goals.

As more of these multi-stakeholder approaches take root, companies will forge new bonds with previously strange bedfellows. Talent and intellectual property will be shared, perhaps even among competitors. Organizations seeking to either compete or collaborate with these companies will find that they need to deal with network dynamics, not just individual company dynamics.

In the process, one of the business models of yesterday will reappear, albeit in a modified fashion. Competitive corporate networks will emerge, borrowing a page from the traditional keiretsu model of business groups in Japan. Instead of being bound by cross-stock ownership, however, these corporate networks will be bound by cross-IP ownership, fortified by values and goals held in common.

Companies are crafting multi-year strategies to adapt to and embrace sustainability. The companies that stand the test of time will be those that create capabilities to constantly evolve their sustainability strategies as the sustainability movement itself evolves. Considering the above three trends today will help organizations steer their strategies through sustainability's coming twists and turns.


Eric Lowitt is a student and teacher of strategy and sustainability – how companies grow, innovate, and become more agile by embracing sustainability. His first book on the topic, The Future of Value, will be published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, in October 2011.

Learn more about Eric Lowitt at EricLowitt.com and follow him on Twitter @EricLowitt

For more information, please visit Eric's TNNWC Bio.

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How to Keep Ahead of Sustainability's Twists and Turns | SUSTAINABILITY, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE FUTURE OF VALUE

How Much Evidence Do You Need?

Strategy: What Say You? with Jay Deragon

The mass of evidence builds. The old are now writing about the new. The new are writing about the old that get it. Then there are those writing about why businesses don't get it.

From the WSJ: One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.

David Gammel hits the nail on the head in his post over on High Context Consulting on "Three reasons Branded Online Communities Fail."

• Focusing on the technology over the value of the community to its members;
• Failure to assign experienced staff to develop the community;
• Poor or no metrics for measuring success

The Wall Street Journal article quoted by David says, "Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site. Moran points out that there isn’t much of a connection between what businesses want and what they’re measuring. Better metrics might be rankings in Google or the number of inbound links."

The Experience blog says: Social media tools are the building blocks for communities, but communities are more than the sum of their social media parts. If we look to real world communities as a metaphor for virtual ones, social media functions--forums, blogs, micro-blogs, ratings, profiles, friend lists, widgets, collaborative tools, and the like--are the buildings, roads, and utilities, but if no one moves in (or everyone leaves), there is no community. A site rife with Web 2.0 tools that go unused is like a ghost town--empty of life and uninviting to anyone who chances to wander in. As in the real world, a virtual community isn't characterized by its components but by its people.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO said “One of the things to say,very clearly,is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real.If you are of a certain age,you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real.”

The people wonder what is all the fuss about when fundamentally people have been discussing the human relations since the beginning of time.

Then people move into business roles and somehow think human relations take second seat to making money quick......this mentality has breed short term thinking, cost cutting, cover ups and poor quality products and services needing a defense which takes away energy from building relationships, value and pride in what one does and what a business offers.

Maybe all this social stuff is taking us back to the future when relations meant everything. The question is whether business leaders can transform their thinking and their organizations to be more relational. In other words, "How long will business pretend?" they are social rather than be real about relations.

What say you?

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How Much Evidence Do You Need?

Would You Like an Apple or a Berry?

By Chris Kauza
Technology Editor

How do you stay in touch with your network? This month I wanted to investigate some of the more popular devices used in networking – especially since we are currently considering upgrading ours.

We are a boutique consultancy, and are finding that we need to be able to text message and instant message more than we have in the past. That means we are not only spending a lot of time talking on the phone, and we are also doing more texting and IMing (instant messaging) while “on the go”.

As for me, I currently have a five year old Motorola Razr. I had a Blackberry Pearl when they first came out, and really enjoyed its features. However, I went back to the razor, because I didn't need the enterprise functionality of the Pearl, and only used it for calls, quick email checks and playing music.

We don't need many of the enterprise-class functions found in Blackberry's offerings. We have been very intrigued by Apple's iPhone and Blackberry's Bold. We've narrowed our considerations down to Apple's newest iPhone and either Blackberry's Bold, Curve, or Pearl.

The iPhone is cool, but we have heard and experienced horror stories where people have not always been able to send e-mails on time, accidentally hanging up phone calls with inadvertent touches on the touch screen, and a menu navigation difficulty while multitasking (i.e. - driving).

Price is relevant but longevity and functionality are more important, as are:

• Ease of use.
• Support.
• Upgradability and Memory capacity.
• Durability.
• Global portability.

Web browsing is interesting at this point, but most uses will be for phone calls (cell and Skype), e-mail, texting, playing games and listening to music.

So what do you do when you find yourself in a quandary? You through the question out to your network.

I started a poll on both Plaxo and Linked and received the following responses:

Issues of sample bias and the like aside, we received a good response rate of statistically significant results, and a number of interesting responses. I thought it was interesting that we received roughly the same number responses from both LinkedIn and Plaxo. Secondly, despite all of the marketing and hype surrounding Apple, I don't see a significant difference between the iPhone and Blackberry. In fact, most (42%) would prefer a Blackberry. Of these, the responses were pretty evenly split between the Pearl, the curve, and the forthcoming bowl.

I also found it was interesting that roughly the same number of total respondents answered either iPhone or undecided. Of the “?Others” 4 people recommended the Treo (remember those?) and 2 recommended Google's Android. We are an Open Source company (as much as possible), and Android is very appealing – but it's still too new for us to adopt across the business.

One of the biggest reasons we are hesitant to get an iPhone is that we would be locked into a service relationship with AT&T – something we really want to avoid. Personally, I have consistently had a horrible experience with AT&T, both with their network reliability and quality, and also with their customer service. It was a painful experience, and one I do not wish to repeat

We currently use T-Mobile and have been very satisfied with what the service. T-Mobile also has a “hot spot” offering, which allows us to make low-cost calls from any T-Mobile hot spot - our offices, Starbucks, United Airline's Red Carpet Club - anywhere there is a T-Mobile hot spot. As the price of data services rise, costs is a consideration when thinking about the number e-mails, text messages, videos etc. that we are likely to be accessing in the coming years.

Why is this process important to networking?

A core aspect to networking is reliable connectivity. It's about the quality of connection. It's about the frequency and reliability of that connection. And this is true whether you're talking about a specific piece of technology, or an individual or company with whom you are trying to do business. If you cannot interact with them, if you cannot stay in touch with them and reach them when you need to, then the value of that contact decreases.

Choosing technology is not just about cool factor or a fashion accessory - much like the iPod has become today. It's about making sure you can connect and interact with those you want or need to, in ways that will help you be successful.

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Would You Like an Apple or a Berry?

Social Media Design: Best Practices To Build Your First Open Social Widget

from Robin Good's blog ("Be Smart, Be Independent, Be Good")

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications across many websites which in the end makes it very easy for a large number of individuals to start developing their own social web applications.

Photo credit: UK Open University - edited by Robin Good

Three characterizing traits make OpenSocial such a very compelling proposition for would-be new social web developers:

a) Developers only need to learn the OpenSocial APIs in order to create web apps that work with any OpenSocial-enabled website.

b) Developers have a broad distribution network to reach users because any website can easily implement OpenSocial.

c) Websites also benefit by engaging a much larger pool of third-party developers than they could without a standard set of APIs.

But how difficult is it for you to develop social apps using OpenSocial?

click for more...

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Social Media Design: Best Practices To Build Your First Open Social Widget

Facebook v. Open Social

from Widgetbox...

Facebook_v_google Open Social is a set of social networking application APIs that Google is encouraging all social networks to adopt as their application architecture. Its goal is to standardize social networking apps so that they can be run on more than one social network. It's meant to challenge Facebook's tremendous success with their F8 application platform.
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Facebook v. Open Social

How Open is Open Social?

from
dretblog
Erik Wilde's Web and Information Architecture Musings



google's recently announced Open Social API most importantly is an attempt to get some of the attention that facebook attracted through its facebook API. the idea is simply to more or less mirror the facebook API's functionality in a way which is standardized across social networks. that's good, because developers for social networking apps can now more easily develop them across platforms, and the list of initial supporters of Open Social is impressive (Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING).
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How Open is Open Social?

OpenSocial Should Enable Social Network Interoperability

from Abhishek Tiwari's blog...
According to OpenSocial, Social Networks and other similar services can play hosts and implement to the standard Google API’s. Developers can write applications to these API’s and are automatically enabled to deploy them on any one of these hosts. This introduces the “Write Once, Run Anywhere” paradigm in the ecosystem. You can read more on their official website.

According to Google’s Vic Gundotra, this is valuable for both developers and host networks. With respect to Users, he mentions that they will receive “more, more and more”. More Applications, More Choices across More Websites.

Frankly, I disagree with Vic there. “More” is not always good. I will even go to the extent of saying that the idea of “More” is the single biggest problem with the social networking experience today. I have written about Social Network overload several times before.
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OpenSocial Should Enable Social Network Interoperability

Father of web 2.0 slams Google OpenSocial

Lack of data sharing means platform misses the mark

Tom Sanders in California, vnunet.com 08 Nov 2007

Tim O'Reilly, the father of the term 'web 2.0', has denounced Google's OpenSocial as "boring" and a "full blown disappointment".

OpenSocial offers a standard for applications on social networks that allow developers to market applications on any network supporting the standard. Early supporters include Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace and Google's Orkut.

The standard does not unlock data from the participating network, however, which might have allowed a MySpace user to exchange messages with a LinkedIn user, for example.

The service also will not allow the use of social search engines that let users locate friends across all networks.

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Father of web 2.0 slams Google OpenSocial

Google's Secret Society, by Andy Greenberg for Forbes.com

Who's the Google of social networking sites? The obvious answer may seem to be Facebook, given its rapid growth, successful cooperation with application developers, and ever-smarter ad targeting. But by some measures, the real answer is even more obvious: Google itself.

This week, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) is drawing attention to its often-ignored social networking site, Orkut.com, with a redesign intended to prettify the site's Spartan look. And attention is deserved: Despite its low profile in the U.S., Orkut now draws 38.2 billion page views a month worldwide, 7.8 billion more than Facebook, according to comScore Media Metrix.

In Brazil, where Facebook and MySpace are virtually unknown, Orkut has become a smash hit, with 15.6 billion page views monthly, by the count of Nielsen/Net Ratings. That kind of popularity doesn't just dwarf Facebook's Brazilian traffic, which is practically nil; it's also nearly 10 billion more monthly page views than Facebook draws from Americans.

Orkut's success in Brazil seems largely to be a fluke. The site hasn't made any special appeal to Brazilians, and only began to offer a Portuguese-language option in April of 2005, long after it had become the social network of choice in Brazil. One blogger argues that its name, which was taken from Turkish-born Google engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, is catchy in Portuguese and reminds Brazilians of a popular yogurt drink for kids.

But a bigger question than the cause of Orkut's popularity is the site's potential for profit. Facebook will earn more than $100 million this year, according to one of the site's investors, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. And with the right advertisers, Orkut's Brazilians and other foreign users could also be a significant source of revenue, argues Greg Sterling, a consultant with Sterling Market Research. "If you've got the ad coverage, an international user is as valuable as anyone," he says.

In fact, Google's foreign advertising coverage has been spreading. The company's revenues from sources outside the U.S. and Britain, earned almost entirely from selling targeted ads, amounted to $1.24 billion last quarter, nearly twice the number from just a year ago. That brings the percentage of Google's foreign revenue to 60.8%, up from 46.7% last year.

While that spending might make Orkut an unlikely "heavy-weight" of social networking, as blogger Michael Arrington recently wrote, the site will need to gain a much larger U.S. audience to compete long-term with networks like MySpace and Facebook. MySpace still leads the social networking market by a large margin, and Facebook tripled its audience in the last year, according to comScore, while Orkut grew only 64%.

But Google, which won't disclose Orkut's revenue numbers, has recently been putting more of its massive resources behind the site. On top of this week's redesign, the company last year sponsored a social networking project at Carnegie Mellon to develop a tool meant to improve Orkut's domestic popularity. The result was Socialstream, a prototype for a site that allows users to post text and multimedia content to a single page, then syndicate that content to any social network where they have a profile.

Combined with Orkut, Socialstream might be just the sort of Googlish innovation that breaks down the "walled-garden" approach to social networking favored by Facebook and MySpace and brings American eyeballs to Orkut. If Google could provide Orkut with a competitive advantage, it could easily build a community from the audience that uses its services like Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Maps, Google Calendar and its photo-sharing site, Picasa, says Sterling.

"Until now, Orkut has been an also-ran in the U.S. because it's been neglected by Google," Sterling says. "But with just a few tweaks and redesigns, and in combination with all of Google's services, it has the potential to really differentiate itself from MySpace and Facebook."

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Google's Secret Society, by Andy Greenberg for Forbes.com

Face Off Orkut, by Parul Bindra

If the messengers of the world (the IM ones) led the way of chatting and finding new friends, social networking provided a better way of meeting people with matching interests. With the rise of social networking sites. Orkut revolutionized the way people stayed in touch.

From quite some time now, Orkut has been seeing a whole lot of popularity all over the world. With more and more people joining in daily I think Google now looks very keen changing the overall appearance of the site to enhance the entire brand image. Just a couple of days ago they introduced some new features like photo and rich content scrap, favourite videos and feeds, making communication much easier with friends and share content. They have also translated the site into 12 languages further making it easier for users to add friends globally.

Why is Orkut changing its interface?

From the past few years Orkut has been dominating social networking. After Orkut claiming the best position in this segment a lot of companies worldwide couldn’t resist grabbing a piece of action.

Today Orkut has realized that it’s not just a game of more features and a better software, but it’s about creating a better platform that gives a rich user experience to internet users.

As the competition soars more and more social networking sites are sky-scraping. MySpace, Linkedin and Facebook have been flooded with more users and also have been pulling a lot of user base from Orkut.

If the software and the content is not appealing, it becomes very comfortable for people to try new networking sites. So the question arised for Orkut, will they stick to their old dull site or will get a more innovative interface for a rich user experience. And there they are taking it in their stride.

How can Orkut increase their user base?

So, it looks like Orkut has changed its look finally!
But will it help them to fit in? After all, its Facebook, MySpace and more other social networking sites standing high.
My opinion is that Orkut will have to make a choice for different services than others, quite like what is not in the market today.

Internet users now look for a rich web experience in this prevailing competition. This richer experience, however, is the USP of any social networking site. The site should carry rich content and information, should be less complexed and less prone to errors.

Users now expect Social networking sites to deliver a more compelling experience with expanded offerings, improved usability, and at an absolute minimum, they expect the site to work properly regardless of their browser and system preferences. Users are growing increasingly impatient, and have zero-tolerance for sites that fail to work as expected. Consequently, when users experience site failures, they more likely try other networks.

And at last, Orkut should carry the most quality, relevant links as it wins the internet. The main aim of any social networking site is to increase their userbase. So Orkut will have to make sure to use all of the methods for enhancing their services to users to achieve reliable and lasting results.

Orkut into the Future

To Internet companies around the world, it has become more than apparent that Internet users are embracing Orkut with great enthusiasm. The Internet is becoming more than just a place to find information - it is now a place to interact, communicate, learn and opine on a wide variety of subjects. Orkut has a forum that has popped up all over the site in order for members to share information, ask questions and even form relationships. This is a trend which is not going to fade away anywhere in near future.

Orkut has a population of teenagers and middle aged people also. Every year new users join Orkut and the chain is ever growing. The bubble of Orkut has not burst and does not look like it is going to burst in near future. There are other social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook but it has kept its feet firmly planted. The trend in Orkut will not only be in social networking but also business networking.





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Face Off Orkut, by Parul Bindra

Orkut / Google's social networking site...

Finally : Google to change look of their social networking site ...
Maybe you received a coveted invitation from a friend, heard about it in a blog, or stumbled upon it when searching for a social network on google.com.Whether yesterday or 3 years ago, It was same.
Digg / Technology / digg - http://digg.com/view/technology
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Orkut / Google's social networking site...