Two Seats on Council

Member firms nominate two delegates for direct Council participation: a business manager interested to leverage the new world of social computing for tangible results, plus an IT partner / colleague.   This arrangement builds cross-learning and diversity in the Council, facilitates greater transfer back to the workplace, and keeps us grounded in reality.

Three Face-to-Face Meetings per Year

Virtual meetings have their place, but the maximum learning bandwidth is still found in full-spectrum human interaction in a safe, confidential conference. The format of a typical two-day meeting is outlined below. The tone we set is “Clear Thinking and Straight Talk.”

Guest Speakers

Adding spice and inspiration from outside, the Council invites one or two guest speakers to a meeting, drawn from leading researchers, business authors, and provocative voices from the 2.0 world. The membership again directs the Council in selecting the topic or domain of expertise for our guest speakers.

Strategy & Organization

Most leaders put their emphasis on pressing business objectives and tangible action plans, and that’s as it should be. If the overall initiatives are not connected to some explicit framework of competitive strategy and change management, however, we wind up with serious problems.

The history of most large firms is littered with debris of “Three Letter Acronym” programs, each launched with high hopes and brave talk. An honest appraisal reveals high failure rates, frustrated workers, and a certain “flavor of the month” reputation for change programs.

The Council will make available some tested analytic frameworks on strategy and organization (many from MIT Sloan School of Management) to help us avoid this fate. The structure will allow us to keep score, keep focused, and take coherent notes.

Typical Meeting Agenda

There is a blend of structured exchange, presentations, open forum discussion, and plenty of time for less formal interaction over breaks, meals, and social time. The content for each meeting is member-driven, but reflects the objectives of the Council and emergent trends in technology and corporate use. Our members tend to say that the peer networking with informed, successful colleagues is the most valuable takeaway.

Meetings usually start with a social dinner the evening prior. The following two days follows an agenda as selected by members, including business content and technology portions. The meetings are candid sharing of what is working and what is not. This results in a practical, timely and high level exchange.

We have all been to meetings where we waste time listening to pontification. In this Council, we have practicing managers talking about real work and real-work challenges. Hence “Clear Thinking and Straight Talk.”

Online Collaboration and Learning

In a fast moving field such as Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, the members will need to keep learning and sharing insights beyond the limits of the three meetings per year.  Informal peer networking can and will occur in private channels (phone, email, IM) in any case, but the Council as a whole will benefit from a shared learning platform, that traps the knowledge, makes it persistent, visible, and searchable.

The Council therefore will be launching a private online community with documents, templates, wiki pages, favorite web links, tagging, RSS news feeds.  This supports ongoing connections allowing members to drive emergent features & functionality.  In the spirit of emergence, we provide only what is used; we weed our garden annually.