Neoco

“Practically Radical” is a book full of examples and ways to transform your company through non-traditional methods.

It’s a book on leadership, which first makes you question what the term “leadership” means, before presenting Williams’s ideas on the term and then explaining how to become a leader: “This book is meant as a guide for leaders in all walks of life who aspire to fix what’s wrong with their organizations”.

Williams includes a wealth of case studies that look at how some of the leading online companies are doing things differently, all of which add weight to what he is trying to explain to us. However the book not only reveals what others are doing but also explains the principles behind their thinking.

The book has numerous examples of how great companies became leaders in their fields by striving to deliver the BEST possible customer experience, including Zappos and Lexus (of which Williams writes “To design a best in the world customer experience, Lexus immersed itself in its customers world”). Williams goes on to propose that the game changers were those that didn’t only check their profit lines but also checked their customer experience and brand identities. This leads into what I thought was the most interesting chapter: “Hidden genius at work – from shared minds to helping hands”.

This chapter outlines how many companies have found the answers to their problems either from within the company itself or from the minds of their most engaged customers. Williams argues that leaders and organisation heads can no longer afford to have a “top down” mentality when trying to run things. Rather, they need to grasp that employees have a wealth of creative solutions waiting to be tapped into and that it’s the responsibility of a great leader to help draw them out and encourage staff to speak their mind.

“This isn’t just collective intelligence it’s collective capability.”

A great example highlighted within the book concerns Netflix. In a nutshell, Netflix wanted to improve their Cinematch collaborative filtering algorithm which predicted user ratings for films (based on previous ratings). Netflix ran a public competition over the course of two years with the incentive of a US$1,000,000 prize to the team who could improve the algorithm’s results by 10%. By engaging fans and users of the service (with the added incentive of a grand prize) an answer was suggested and in the long run Netflix saved millions.

It’s an extremely insightful book. Although I instinctively agreed with many of the points raised, the evidence provided by the wealth of examples and case studies made me feel more confident that collaboration within all organizations is the key to innovation and moving forward.

Long gone are the days of “the lone CEO” – the new model is that of a nurturing leader who is involved with his employees or students. This reminded me of a point raised by Sir Ken Robinson when he explained his frustration with the current education system. Sir Ken believes that we are educating our children using outdated models by keeping them divided based on their age. Rather, Sir Ken believes that learning and creativity are unleashed through collaboration and should be encouraged in children.

On a personal level I believe this to be very true. Whenever I’ve worked on any project I’ve never just had a single flash of genius – it’s usually happened through going back and forth with people and arriving at a final idea together. This has nearly always been the case – whether it’s been in a coffee shop or an agency’s meeting room.

The future is likely to be open, all about encouraging collaboration and embracing new ideas. The social realm is moving at an incredible pace and the collaborative touchpoints between individuals and their customers, friends and employees will only multiply. In return these will provide great ways to get insights and innovate for many businesses.

This idea in particular reminded me of one of a very insightful Social Media Apps talk I attended during the last Social Media Week in London. A big part of the talk revolved around apps collaborating and sharing data with each other. A very successful example of this was Flixster collaborating with Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster is an app that lets you know the cinema times of all the cinemas in the country. By sharing data with Rotten Tomatoes they can pull in the user ratings from their website, ultimately providing the app user with an extra layer of user information.

Each connection can lead to a possible idea or solution – and if you’re not taking advantage of your connections, it might be time to ask yourself: “Who else is?”

Tags  collaboration customer experience leadership Practically Radical Social Media Week William C. Taylor