Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business

Description

Is Your Company EMPOWERED for Success? You know it's happening within your organization. Your people, armed with cheap, accessible technology, are connecting with customers and building innovative new solutions. But who are these creative problem-solvers? How can you be one? And just as important-how can you lead them? We call them HEROes: highly empowered and resourceful operatives. Your company needs them because in the age of Twitter, iPhones, Facebook, YouTube, and an ever-evolving torrent of Web information, your customers now step up to the counter armed with more data and access than ever before, and in many cases, your company is overmatched. In Empowered, Forrester's Josh Bernoff-coauthor of the pioneering book Groundswell-and Ted Schadler explain how to transform your company by unleashing the mighty force of these HEROes. Like John Bernier and Ben Hedrington at Best Buy, who built an army of 2,500 tweeting employees to reach out to customers online. Or Ross Inglis, who tapped into Internet computing resources to open an entirely new customer channel for Thomson Reuters. Or John Stadick, who equipped 600 sales staff with iPhones and boosted profits at his construction rental company. The truth is, one in three of your information workers already use easily accessible technologies that your company does not sanction. Empowered gives you a prescription for embracing this covert innovation. At the heart of a HERO-powered business is a new pact between these critical employees, company managers, and the IT department: HEROes build new solutions to meet customer needs, management sets clear rules while encouraging more experimentation, and IT expands its role to both support and secure these business solutions. Fueled by data from Forrester Research, Empowered is packed with the business tools and information necessary to move your organization several steps ahead of the competition: * Statistical analysis of the 16% of customers who account for 80% of the online influence * The four-step IDEA process to transform customer-facing service, marketing, and mobile applications * A tool to score HERO projects on value and effort, to offer guidance on which projects to support * The HERO index: A scorecard of the industries and departments with the most-and the fewest-HEROes * Roadmaps for collaboration systems that stimulate and support HERO innovation * The game plan for IT's new role as a key partner in technology ideas throughout the company * Dozens of case studies and examples from firms in every industry, from retail to business services Armed with an arsenal of exciting and valuable new technologies, your employees are already transforming the way you do business. You can lead them or block them-it's your choice. Empowered will help you make the right decision.

Josh Bernoff is senior vice president, idea development at Forrester Research and is responsible for identifying, developing, and promoting the company's most influential and forward-looking ideas. Josh is the coauthor of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008), a BusinessWeek bestseller that has sold close to 80,000 copies to date. Abbey Klaasen of Advertising Age picked it as "the best book ever written on marketing and media," and Amazon's editors put it in their top 10 business books of 2008. In the same year, the Society for New Communications Research picked Josh and his Groundswell coauthor Charlene Li as "visionaries of the year." Josh has been a Forrester analyst for 14 years. He created the Technographics segmentation, a data format integral to all of Forrester's consumer research. Josh is also known for 10 years of analysis of the television industry. Josh's research has been featured on 60 Minutes. His research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently in publications and media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. He writes a column for Marketing News, a publication of the American Marketing Association, and blogs for Forrester and Advertising Age. Ted Schadler is one Forrester Research's most innovative and wide-ranging contributors. With 21 years of experience in the software industry, Ted advises clients in a wide variety of industries on collaboration tools and practices. Ted's current research objective is to help clients understand the impact of emerging technologies on information workers. His work includes research on real-time collaboration tools, the economics of cloud-based collaboration, and the effect of mobile devices on enterprise collaboration. Ted launched Workplace Technographics, a unique approach to understanding what information workers need from technology and Internet services. Ted has five years of experience conducting quantitative studies of consumers and companies in 14 countries, with more than 1 million completed surveys. These studies include work on segmentation development, market sizing, behavioral and attitudinal analysis, and persona creation

"This is a worthwhile book for anyone in business to read, not just for marketing or innovation, but also for strategy." -- Journal of Consumer Marketing "...is a well-written, useful guide to how companies can empower their employees." - Ad Age "If the future sounds scary, Empowered describes it in reasonable, even methodical terms. The book Empowered is a milestone for where things are headed, both for the business manager and the IT manager." - InformationWeek "...this book is a practical explanation of how social influence marketing, which is having your customers create customers for you--works! Loaded with lots of easy to understand cases, this is an information packed book demonstrating that social technology has become universal." Chief Executive