The Big Short - A Human Story

Living in New Orleans, it is gratifying to see one of its native sons do well. With the Saints winning the Super Bowl this year behind quarterback Drew Brees and now author Michael Lewis sharing his recent book, The Big Short, Inside the Doomsday Machine, an expose on the recent global financial crisis, there is a lot to be proud of in the "Big Easy".

In the case of Lewis, once you start you can't put down the "Big Short". More than that, while reading it, you can't imagine the story could be true; but it is. More than just a recount of facts about the financial crisis and what happened during the past decade, the book is a deeply human story about a small group of people and what they faced with clear minds amid a group of lunatics.

Read Felix Salmon's review on the Barnes and Noble site, here is an exerpt:

The result is that rarest of beasts in a world drowning in financial-crisis books: a new book which actually breaks news. For instance, Lewis uncovers what could possibly be the single greatest trade that any Wall Street banker ever made: in December 2006 and January 2007, Deutsche's Greg Lippmann paid an insurance premium of 0.28 percentage points to take out insurance on $4 billion of triple-A-rated bonds from Morgan Stanley's Howie Hubler. Less than a year later, that $11 million bet paid off to the tune of a whopping $3.7 billion. I'll save you the math: that's an annual return of more than 33,000%. There's lots more where that came from: this is an assiduously-reported and beautifully-written book. There aren't many reasons to be happy about the global financial crisis, but here's one: that it brought Michael Lewis back to his roots, to produce what is probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written.

The story illustrates how institutions run by experienced people with a lot of knowledge can fail, quickly and dramatically. What happened in the financial markets can and will increasingly occur in many industries, as leadership becomes disconnected from the day to day realities being impacted by rapid advancements and change.

Watch the recent interview on Charlie Rose where Lewis shares more details and views. Get the book and remember that when everyone thinks they know the facts sometimes they don't.

Why is Google Successful ?

Tom Davenport comments that "you can't emulate everything that Google does", and he's right. But it is instructive to watch his HBR interview as he outlines the unique yet basic things Google has done to be successful. Here are some of Tom's thoughts:

1. Develop a scalable platform;

2. Have an excellent method of testing and deploying new products and services;

3. Have a high tolerance for failure; and

4. Treat knowledge workers in a method that improves their productivity.

Methods of organization and innovation are fundamental to success in any organization and these are but a few. Our companies try and help people adopt the forementioned and other disciplines that are part of best practices for success today. Watch this interesting interview.

Helping Organizations Succeed - Leadership & Emotional Intelligence

Its funny, with all of the existing and emerging tools, the biggest challenge facing businesses is not technology, its people. To get folks to work together well takes a lot of ingredients. Unfortunately in many instances "leadership" is not helping. The issues at the top burden and stiffle the organization and inhibit the potential that readily exists but is unrealized because of the lack of awareness at the top. I have seen it over and over again in many businesses which I have consulted with and participated in.

Daniel Goldman shares some interesting instights on Emotional Intelligence pertaining to leadership. This Harvard Business Review clip, part of an excellent series, is worth a look to learn more about how organizational achievement in the LONG RUN is largely influenced by the emotional intelligence of its leadership.

Why Your Organization Better Jump Into Cloud Computing

Let’s say you’re like many small to medium sized companies with information systems comprised of a variety of pieces. You have one or two in-house servers, a number of laptops and PC’s, a Microsoft operating system, desktop applications like word processing, spreadsheets, Outlook and perhaps a third party proprietary Intranet application accessed over the Internet. This is common for many small to mid sized organizations.

Trouble is, if you take a moment to calculate what the cost of all this technology and maintenance is for your company you might be surprised. Upgrades, hardware maintenance, software licenses all add up. Don’t even mention that you are unable to really manage what folks are up to on a day to day basis.

To make this more challenging your people aren’t able to take full advantage of things like their smart phones, mobile internet access while they are on the go or at home, social media, and other advancing technologies. This would help them be more productive in serving customers or developing new business.

To make it even more alarming, what is you ARE relying on a third party vendor, which might have financial issues you are unaware of given today’s environment, to manage and host your Intranet content or business systems based on a proprietary infrastructure? You may have some real trouble ahead. What happens if they fold ? What upgrades are they making to adopt new tools ? What is your EXIT strategy ?

You have a problem that deservers consideration. The good news is there is a solution. You just need to gather the will to understand the tremendous risk and opportunity that  all organizations face today around their information systems.

With all of the advancements in technology available to organizations today, particularly with the cloud, you really really have to sit down and take account of how you are using your IT and strongly consider shifting your strategy to the cloud....Entirely to the cloud. Sooner not later would be a very good idea.

Watch Mark Benioff CEO of salesforce.com explain the cloud, technology and what is happening and why you should jump in. Don’t wait and let your competitors beat you to the punch.

Social CRM - Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences

A recent report by Gartner, commissioned by Salesforce.com, addresses important trends in customer service as the social web continues to impact how individuals and organizations interface. You can get a copy of the report for FREE here.

The implications of new technologies and how people are relating via social media have significant implications. Businesses that get their hands around how to really benefit from this change will have a tremendous opportunity to make a difference by delivering support in new and exciting ways.

A few key finds and recommendations from the study are as follows:

•    Expectations for social CRM (tapping into social networks to improve marketing, sales and service processes) will dramatically exceed the measurable benefits.
•    For much of the world, Facebook will – or already has – become the dominant social networking site. Marketeers and customer service managers will need to take this into consideration when planning social networking projects, while monitoring for shifts in user sentiment.
•    A new generation of Internet Protocol (IP)-based contact center solutions with preintegrated IP interaction recording platforms will be far more effective and less expensive than previous platforms.
•    Consumer willingness to perform all possible customer service functions themselves (self- service) will be universal by 2011.
Recommendations
•    Vice presidents of customer service or customer experience should be sure to measure the consistency and effectiveness of customer interactions across all touchpoints from the customer’s point of view.
•    The popularity of social networking sites means that the service organization cannot expect the customer to come to the corporate website only, but must work on ways to reach out to the customer at these destinations as well.
•    When developing a long-term strategic road map for contact center infrastructure, include call recording as part of this single-vendor solution.

Learn more about Social CRM and salesforce.com's in the video below.