I am currently dealing with a situation at work in which a group that services customers has just figured out that talking to said customers is a good way to figure out what they need and make them happy. I have thus far resisted the urge to meet this phenomenal insight with the expression "No shit, Sherlock!" and I will refrain from doing so here as well...

Fortune.  Management gurus have arrived with a business oriented version of the Clue-Train (and they are going to make a mint on this):

This new style of business, birthed by the Internet, is ignored at any company's peril. In an excellent new book, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, authors C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy describe the consumer's new role: "from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active." .... In the bottom-up economy, presuming you know what the customer wants is the ultimate error. Prahalad and Ramaswamy instead call for "co-creation of value": The successful products and services from now on will be those developed jointly—company and customer working hand in hand.

[John Robb's Weblog]

8:00:26 AM    

Blogging the market needs work.

Blogs As Intra-enterprise Technologies of Cooperation.

George Dafermos at MIT, in Blogging the Market (93 page PDF) , looks at pervasive blogging as potential organizational dynamite, with case histories that include Slashdot, Amazon, Macromedia, Groove Networks, and Gizmodo.

(Thanks, Jim!)

[Smart Mobs]

I had real problems with this report. It's gotten a fair number of pointers from other blogs and the outline looked intriguing. After about an hour skimming through it though I think there's probably a really good 20-page report lurking in there somewhere, but in its present form it's hard to justify the time to dig it out. If I were reviewing this paper as a referee I send it back for major revisions. Too bad, because I think it's asking the right questions.

[McGee's Musings]

7:57:23 AM