Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

It is obvious that internet is the most wondrous technology invention.

The entire community has rapidly became obssesed with it.Everywhere you look you're bound to see something related to the Internet

There is little doubt about how useful the Internet can be. Student can receive help with homework, investors can keep track of stocks, sports scores and statistics are just a click away for fans,newspapers are not any more made of paper,we don’t need any more bookshelves to place our preferred books,and the post office is placed in our office just inside our pc and we don’t have to wait for days just to send a birdhday card . Those are just a few ways people use internet.

The book is a bit outdated comparing to technology and social media development,but every word written on it is still current.It was not only a informative book but its was also so entertaining to read due to its case studies and enjoyable examples.

What is ground swell? I became curious what the book tittle meanining was..and gave a look in a web dictionary.

“It is an obvious change of public opinion or political sentiment that occurs without leadership or overt expression” ( http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ground+swell )

Also looking around in the internet i read something really interesting “If you are a senior corporate executive and have not read this book, you should either plan for your own retirement in the very near future or settle into the reality you have reached your peak and others will advance and excel in the new commercial environment.”

And it is really true,because understanding the “groundswell” effect is really so easy those days to have a successful and cheap marketing campaign thanks to social media,it is really easy to have the consumers reviews and impressions.Helps reaching the target market online and develope ur bussines the way ur consumers want it,so this way make the perfect bussines model where the consumer is the “King”(decision taker).

This book is also a good one for people not interested in bussines and e-commerce,it can help the bloog critics as well as collectors,joiners and and spectators.

And to conclude I would like to mention an interesting quote.

There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network. Guy Almes

IMMUNITY TO CHANGE

Leading change:  What leaders must do

Is leadership simply innovation—cultural or political? Is it essentially inspiration? Mobilization of followers? Goal setting? Goal fulfillment? Is a leader a definer of values? Satisfier of needs? If leaders require followers, who leads whom from where to where, and why? How do leaders lead followers without being wholly led by followers? Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.

What is the change?

Why is the change needed?

How will the change affect me personally?

Will I win or lose?

What do I do first?

How do I manage all the details?

      Is the effort worth it?

Is the change making a difference?

Who else should be involved?

How do we spread the word?

How can we make the change even better?

1)     Leading change must be a way of life.

2)     Leading change is as multifaceted as a diamond. (Change is constant or variant. Leading change is, as such, a many-sided and far-reaching enterprise. It requires leaders that are perceptive and favorably adaptive to change.)

3)     Leading change requires commitment from all involved.

4)     Leading change means “sloughing off” yesterday and today.

5)     Leading change involves avoiding the “boiled frog” syndrome. (If you put a frog in a frying pan and slowly turn up the heat, the frog will not jump out but will rather fry to death. If you put a frog in boiling water, however, it will immediately jump out. Hence, if people in an organization do not sense a momentous gap between where they are and where they need to be, they will stay in their “comfort zone” and, so to speak, “get passed by,” become “obsolete,” or perhaps “perish.”)

6)     Leading change must establish relevance.

7)     Leading change means asking the right questions.

8)     Leading change means creating early victories. (People need to see some initial evidence that a new idea is working and that it produces results).

9)     Leading change means recognizing the paradox of change. (Change is again constant. Leading change means understanding that a new idea may need to be changed further along the continuum of time. Thus the “irregularity” and “capriciousness” of change.)

10) Leading change involves creating a learning organization.

11) Leading change means competing against oneself.

12) Leading change means building coalitions.

BOOK.6. FOLLOWERSHIP

In modern days many beggars lay on the streets and this has become a common and worrying occurrence .

Many people have lost their houses and/or jobs and now vagabonding on the streets trying to find ways to survive everyday.

They sit on the edges of streets ,parks or bridges asking for money even using their children to attract the attention of the walkers.
Many of these walkers pass without turning their heads to these beggars. They show a high level of indifference and they do not care about this phenomenon. In this group of people unfortunately sometimes I am a member.
We do not do anything to stop this phenomenon: either to contribute individually or to create the right connections with different organizations to help these people.
Being a bypasser is a damage not only for those people who suffer but also for the whole society that don't think about them.

An important paragraph is written in different sacred books: "Do to others as you would have them do to you".

Ortenca

Click: The Magic of Instant Connections by Ory and Rom Brafman

Those days when technology and computers can do anything for us ,understanding and controlling the human to human relations keeps being the most difficult task for everyone of us.Every children would like to be the most loved from his parents,every student would like to be the most famous of the class,every manager would want to be loved by his team.

What makes us connect to some people in a very easy way and so difficult to have a relation with some others?

Most of us have had the unusual experience forming an instant connection with someone else within minutes, or even within seconds, of our first introduction

We also may think all those things happen randomly,me too was one of those people thinking this way before reading this eye-opening book.

This book is trying to study and analyze the way we are creating intense and successful connections to other people,Firstly it looked like a romantic guide “How to be successful on dating” ,and going on realized the ways we “click” on bussines ,how "click accelerators" work, how much important is clicking other people and the way it affects our welfare.

I really liked the social experiments they made and the way they are analyzing them.It is interesting how they determine the importance of touch and how it affects relation between team members,or how the guy having the room in the middle of the dormetry was the most famous guy,or how the most vulnerable persons get the most attention,and police officers negotiating with terrorists.

Authors determine 5 main accelerators of clicking:

1. Vulnerability which seems to be the most important and most successful of those accelerators.

(Being vulnerable helps other people to be more confident and make them trust more easily because you are putting yourself in a risk so they tend to react almost the same way by being vulnerable too so this way we are “clicking”.

2. Proximity is also mentioned as a important accelerator

(This means that we are more inclined connecting to people who are nearby,and the interesting experiment with the guys with the room in the middle of the dorm is the best example.We all can can conclude that our best friends are people we are working with or at least people we spend most of the time even though we didn’t choose to stay with them so all we could be a good example for Ori and Rom Brafman)

3. Similarity

(It is obvious that we connet easier with the people who are more similar to us,everyone of us could prove this statemen,however it is interesting how people “click” just because their names are the same,or they are sharing the same date of birth. It appears that for similarity, quantity matters more than quality. It is not very important how deeply people agree, but on how many different topics they agree.

There are two more “click” Accelerators mentioned in the book which I think are more derivates of the three first mentioned above than Accelerators themselves.

4. Resonance

(Is about being present and flow. Just by showing up, asking questions, expressing genuine interest have a higher resonance factor than those who don’t, so all this means that as much you engage with the other situation the more clicking is possible)

5. Safe Place is the final click accelerator

(It means having a clearly defined community, going through an adverse experience with someone, or being part of a defined "in-group” The example of the soldiers being in the same action is a good example wich also leads with the “Proximity”)

And to conclude I don’t think this book is a receipe on how being successful with clicking to other people because of the abstract nature of human behavior, but can help to be better on clicking or to understand the meaning and the importance of click itself.

We click everyday,we click our leaders,we click our subordinates,we click our family members,we click our friends,so all our bussines and personal life deals with click.We must take care to click the best way possible.

Book.5. The Power of Positive Deviance

We need solution in every area of our lives and business either we owe everything or we have nothing.
It is necessary for us to know how from the difficulties to become stronger and more famous or popular than others.
In every field of life or work we face difficulties. These difficulties are closely related to solutions needed to be found for different situations and issues.
In fact the concept of "positive deviance" is nothing more or nothing less than Being the best among the others despite the lack of opportunities.

Being in the group of people that knows how to benefit and to be better than the others in these kind of situations means in simple words: "to be the Positive deviants".

Watching the news on TV I heard about the fact that in public schools one of the main problems is the usage of knifes or other kinds of weapons. These objects often brings out bloody quarrels and increase the fear among pupils. As parents need to find very secure places for their children they also think about choices for the schools they want their children to study and also to be safe.

As they do not have enough money to send them in private schools ,where the security is in higher levels (example of positive deviance) they try to find other public schools that have higher levels of security and also level of education (another example of positive deviances).

Being the Positive Devinat often is not  easy. You have to go through some difficulties to find the best solution and to achieve to be the best. It is a kind of competitive advantage that the business needs to find in order to survive or expand even in eras of crisis.

Ortenca

The Power of Positive Deviance

The power of positive deviance

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Followership

Followership

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Groundswell

Groundswell

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Click

Click

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Book No.1. SWITCH

Life is strange! No one is able to understand if he is running its own life or he is just following the stream in a meaningless existence. Who is directing who? Who are the liders ? Who is more strong the logic or the animalistic instincts?
I believe that the real life is some sort of an equilibrium between all the above questions an some others more.
Of course for the masses the instincts lead the way, but for the few ( which are the most educated ones ) the logic which they learned to follow is the leader.
IDI

Groundswell

Library is a sacred place for many Russians as it was for me. I spent a lot of time of my school and university life in libraries believing that it is the most important source of knowledge. Sometimes I was waiting for two weeks to take a certain valuable book because there was a queue for it. Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? Now days paper books become less and less usable especially among youngsters. You can consider me as an old-fashioned lady but my books are my treasure. They are kinds of pets. I buy what I am interested in, what I love and then read them carefully. It doesn’t mean I don’t read anything from Internet  but what I read is articles, reviews or expert opinions but not books(except our course books of course). I could never imagine that  Groundswell would be of my interest. But what I learnt from this book made me think about changing world of technology. You accept it or it will work against you. “It is like a flood that can’t be stopped….And while you can’t stop it, you can understand it. You can not only live with it; you can thrive in it. That’s the point of this book.” The fact that everything is free is promising and frightening at the same time. On one hand, customers have a chance to share their opinions about goods or services of the companies, but on the other hand, many companies can go bankrupt because there will be no need of them. It is good for me since I am a customer, my life is becoming easier from many points of view. I am becoming a follower in whose hands there is a certain part of power. Li and Bernoff state: ”Your brand is whatever your customers say it is” It is a very good motto for the companies which trust themselves more than their clients. It will make them wake up and think about their strategies and approaches more carefully.   

BOOK.4. GROUNDSWELL,Winning in a world transformed by social technologies

Technology and internet has changed our lives. We rely on technology for every day things.

Checking the weather so we can pick the clothes to wear, checking the maps to find a location of a shop, reading the newspaper, learning, search for telephone numbers,  taxi, businesses, friends, search a cooking recipe, checking our e-mail, checking our agenda or synchronizing our agenda with friends, family work peers etc.

Spreading the news, spreading the gossip it all happens fast on the internet and is facilitated by social network sites. In just few seconds the same news, songs…are spread to the whole planet.

We all use internet tools like skype , facebook , gmail, gtalk etc to cover our needs for communication with friends, family, classmates, colleagues and even customers.

Technology and internet have really changed the way we do things; it all seems faster, very simple and convenient. We can do almost everything from our office, home and sofa without moving a bit.

And if we need to move…mobile internet is there for our service. Many of us are found of Iphone and other smartphone devices that allow us to be online connected 24/7 wherever we are.

All of these changes have brought mobile phones and notebooks in the centre of our attention. We all confess that it has become a habit to look at our mobile devices several times per day, checking our inbox or facebook. The notebook screens and phone screens have taken all our attention. We rely in those devices for day to day activities and feel lost without them.

And of course this is something that business and corporations realize more and more. Many of them use the same tool and social networks but for a different aim, to get our attention to their product and services. And they adapt to this with new communication and brand management techniques, even their products adapt ebanking, ecommerce, mobile payment, mobile banking etc.

With internet services and tools it seems that the planet becomes smaller and closer to us.

regards
Nikoleta Dervishi

The New Trends and Concepts 2010: SWITCH: Rider & Leadership Skills

The New Trends and Concepts 2010: SWITCH: Rider & Leadership Skills

Click 3

“Click” is the most important thing in negotiation, making constructive dialogue, in short, in communication. The first aspect of people’s interrelations is affection. Let you be a businessman, a teacher or anyone else who deals with people, you have to be liked and like who you deal with (or show you like them) to be successful. My beloved teacher told me: ”When you enter the classroom for the first time your first aim is to make your students like you. If you can do it you will be able to teach them.” I had worked as a teacher for 10 years. It really worked. But I realized one more thing that TO BE LOVED is nearly as important as TO LOVE. It is one aspect of affection.

    Another aspect is to be flexible. Some people consider flexibility as losing your own self, having no personal attitude towards things. But  to my mind it is to be adaptive to the environment you are in (country, group of people etc). For example, I had a chance to work in three different countries. It means I had to change my behavior accordingly. I must confess it is not difficult if  you don’t lose your identity and follow your moral principles. It can seem contradicting but to be yourself can help you be flexible. People especially children feel if you are not sincere. They will just not “click” on you.

    To have natural affection and sincere love from whom you want to get something is inseparable part of relation.    

SWITCH: Rider & Leadership Skills

As we remember according to the first book, there are some elephants and some riders. I think if riders have leadership abilities they can be succesfull other wise there is no chance to change the behavior.

Think about a company. Employees are elephant and manager is the rider. As we discussed yesterday there are two types of managers. One of them is classic managers and the other one is manager who also has leadership skills. When we observe all succesfull managers, we can notice that they are also leaders. So that riders also have to have leadership skills.

BR
Burcin Kucukaytekin