Thought leadership whether it’s from academics, industry experts and/or
luminaries is now a seminal component of any marketing program, especially in
the technology industry where the holy grail now is the business value of
technology. The C suite and many LOB managers are now heavily involved in
technology purchasing decisions, which have become much more centralized and
collaborative. Do you know who the thought leaders in your industry are and how
they are engaging with your customers through all the communications mediums
now including social media? If you don’t it’s time to take a good look at your
industry’s landscape. The bullet list below depicts a high level view of a thought
leadership classification model.
Thought Leadership Classification Model
·
Policy & Institutes
·
Strategy & Planning
·
Change
·
Innovation & Collaboration
·
Leadership
·
Infrastructure
·
Operations
·
Finance
Suggested Reading this month is Ranjay Gulati’s new book, Reorganize
for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business and I have
had the pleasure of working with Ranjay over the last several years. “Customer
data, information and case studies are the lifeblood of thought leadership,
“without them thought leaders live with their heads in the clouds, but their
feet are not on the ground,” said Ranjay Gulati of Harvard Business School.” Gulati keeps his feet on the ground and his
head in the clouds by working with vendors and customers alike, much like Mohan
Sawhney of Kellogg and Henry Chesborough of UC Berkeley. As leaders in strategy, vision, execution and
management, the hallmark and success of any successful thought leader is their
knowledge of customer success. Pick up any business management book today and
you will quickly find yourself reading about company success stories in
innovation, organizational management, human resources and product development.
Thought leaders need access to customers and the responsibility of (the most
advanced) vendors today is the development and maintenance of these key
relationships with the leading thought leaders worldwide.
Leveraging thought leaders to provide vision and enhance marketing is
not new to our industry, or to SAP. However, it is becoming very important that
vendors not only leverage their vision and content, but develop and maintain
deep and healthy relationships with these important influencers, especially in
these tough economic times. During the Perfect Storm of business process
re-engineering in the 1980’s, SAP came to market with ERP software at the same
time Michael Hammer’s book about reengineering the corporation radically
changed C suite thinking, and revolutionized business process management. SAP worked
with Michael Hammer throughout the world as a visionary thought leader and during
the 1990’s NCR’s Teradata, leveraged Peppers and Rodgers, the original creators
of CRM to promote their data warehouse. SAS institute (who also gets it) has
been working with Tom Davenport a prolific author on all topics analytic and
enterprise software related. Over the last two years SAP engaged with several
of the industry’s important thought leaders to promote the concept of business
network transformation (BNT), as a result created a book entitled, Business
Network Transformation: Strategies to Reconfigure Your Business Relationships
for Competitive Advantage, proceeds
from this book are contributed to the World Food Organization.
For the most part many universities haven’t understood how to work with
industry vendors outside of the traditional research grant until recently;
however, this is changing significantly in the millennium. Entrepreneurial professors have formed their
own consulting arms over the past several years to work directly with vendors
and are now deeply engaged with many of your customers.
- Harvard’s
Kaplan and Norton formed the powerhouse Palladium group now the gold
standard for performance management experts and even have their own social
media peer group called XPC.
- Harvard
Business School’s Clayton Christiansen formed Innosight.
- Marco
Iansiti, the author of The Keystone Advantage and also a Harvard
professor created the Keystone Strategy Group.
- Mohan
Sawhney of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business is on the
board of British Petroleum, and he is working directly with many large
technology vendors, and his new book The Global Brain is also worth
looking at.
- Ranjay
Gulati of Harvard is working directly with General Electric on innovation
and customer centricity and has published a book: Reorganize for Resilience:
Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.
- Ram
Charan now the world’s leading strategic management consultant is working
with many of the world’s leading CEOs and their boards by stretching their
minds and challenging their philosophies and management styles. He has
published too many books, (some co-authored with CEOs) to list.
- Dr.
Henry Chesborough of
The days of bells and whistles are long gone in our industry, I led a charmed
life during the 1990’s and sold a home run product that had more features,
functions, interoperability, performance than any competitor. Our industry
today is dominated by the platform vendors, technology has become commoditized
and “good enough” is rapidly replacing “best of breed.” The holy grail of
enterprise software now is the business value technology brings to
organizations worldwide and the business critical business processes it
optimizes for competitive advantage, growth, productivity and innovation.
Today’s thought leaders, management consultants and university professors are
playing a major influencing role in many of the world’s leading companies and organizations. Until next time, I wish you great marketing
and selling in the millennium.
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