dimanche 2 octobre 2011
L'âge de l'empathie
La loi du plus fort n'est pas la seule qui régisse les sociétés animales et humaines. Bien au contraire, la survie des espèces passe aussi et surtout par l'entraide, fondée sur la faculté de se mettre à la place de l'autre, voire même de faire passer cet autre avant soi.
La reliance entre l'univers et nous
La science par sa compréhension rationnelle de la matière nous aide à découvrir l’intimité du Vivant : atome , molécule , cellule , étoile , galaxie……
Elle peut être l’élan pour aller vers la solidarité ou la fusion avec les " 10 000 choses qui composent l’univers "comme le disaient les anciens chinois.
Cette nouvelle alliance possible, met en place une écologie des liens nous permettant de sortir de l’Ancien Monde duel où les choses s’opposent dans une dialectique sans équilibre, pour bâtir un nouveau monde de résonance et de raisonnement où l’unité se substitue à la division : la reliance.
Philippe Bobola physicien et biologiste, nous partage sa vision d’un monde réenchanté, ou compréhension et émotion s’harmonisent et s’humanisent.
Il anime des formations pour mieux comprendre "la nature intime du Temps", "le langage de l’Univers," et" les conséquences sur l’homme d’une absence ou d’une rupture de reliance" indispensable à son équilibre.
Do we need defined hours of work any more?
By now, most people who work in the developed world have gotten used to the idea that the old nine-to-five routine is gradually becoming a thing of the past; plenty of people have shifts that start and end at different times, or they use job-sharing and other forms of flex-time. Some don’t even have traditional jobs at all any more, thanks to the evolution of the “gig economy” and the increase in freelancing. All of which raises a question that seems even more appropriate with Labor Day around the corner: Are defined hours of work an anachronism that’s holding us back? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want something still reserved for a select few, and/or a trap that causes us to work more rather than less?
Flexible work is something that seems increasingly popular with programmers and other online workers, for reasons that Zach Holman of the software repository GitHub described in a recent post on the GitHub blog, entitled “Hours Are Bull****.” Holman said that for most of the staff who work on the service, there are no defined working hours whatsoever — everyone is on their own schedule and they work whenever they need to in order to solve the problems that need to be solved. As he puts it:
Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved. Code is a creative endeavor… We want employees to be in the zone as often as possible. Mandating specific times they need to be in the office hurts the chances of that.
Unstructured work is not for everyone
That kind of approach, which management consultants like to call a “results-oriented workplace,” might be fine for a creative endeavor like programming or design, or even for businesses (like GigaOM’s) that involve brain-powered work such as writing. But does it make any sense for other companies and industries? When Holman’s article got passed around in our office, my colleague Stacey said that this view of unstructured work only works for certain people — people without children, for example (who often have fairly rigid schedules governed by school, etc.) or other obligations that require them to work on something closer to a nine-to-five schedule.
Others argued that a less-structured schedule actually makes these things easier to handle rather than harder, since workers can leave whenever is necessary rather than waiting for the whistle to blow at 5.
Although there is plenty of research that shows both workers and companies benefit when hours are more flexible, not everyone — regardless of what business they work in — is going to want to work a totally unstructured schedule. And for some people, a specific routine isn’t just something that they need for external reasons: A job without defined parameters might actually increase the stress they feel, and therefore make them less productive or efficient. (A friend I know used to put on a suit and then walk down the hall to his office at home, just to simulate working in a regular workplace, because he needed the discipline.)
There’s another risk Holman’s description of the new unstructured workplace brings up, something we’ve written about a lot at GigaOM, and that is the impact that this can have on the “work-life balance” of employees. Says Holman:
By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work. Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive. Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work.
If you can work any time, you can work all the time
But if it doesn’t feel like work and you can do it any time, how do you ensure you’re not working all the time? This is an issue that has been exacerbated by our increasingly always-on, always-connected, mobile-device-carrying culture. Knowledge workers of all kinds find themselves answering emails or responding to text messages at all hours of the day and night, working on weekends, and so on. And the increasing globalization of many industries has just accelerated this phenomenon, since some staffers or contract workers may be in completely different time zones.
In some ways, this requires more discipline on the part of the worker themselves: to set boundaries and say that he or she won’t be available at certain times, or to turn off devices during meals and on weekends. It’s something I and others at GigaOM have written about in the past, and something that remains an ongoing struggle. If your work is also something you enjoy doing, then your work can expand to fill virtually every available moment if you let it. But in the long run, that’s not good for employees or companies.
One thing is clear, however: This phenomenon isn’t going away; if anything, it is increasing, as more work becomes knowledge work, and as more companies try to adapt to a cloud-based and global world (flexible hours and an increase in freelance or contract work also has real benefits for companies in terms of lower costs, some of which are pushed down to the individual worker, such as the cost of health benefits).
When work is anywhere, companies need to change too
Companies like VMWare are trying to help figure out how the nature of work changes when it occurs in “the cloud” and the workforce moves toward what CEO Paul Maritz calls the “post-document era.” Instead of sitting at desks moving paper around, more people are working in ways that are difficult to define, that involve streams of information that don’t start or stop at specific times. And companies like Rypple are trying to re-engineer the human-resources requirements in that kind of workplace, so that measuring performance isn’t done once a year or every six months, but in something close to real time, using social tools that make more sense for such an environment.
Some companies have taken the unstructured work idea to its logical conclusion when it comes to traditional institutions such as vacation: Netflix has what it calls an “unlimited vacation” policy, which allows workers to take time whenever they need it, provided they arrange to have their work completed when necessary. Social Media Group, a Toronto-based consulting firm, is another that has taken this approach — one that CEO Maggie Fox described in a recent blog post.
The death of the nine-to-five workplace may not suit everyone, and a completely unstructured work schedule may not become the norm for all industries any time soon, but there’s no question that it is increasingly common. And adapting to it is going to require different skills — not just from employees, but from the companies that employ them.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Seattle Municipal Archives and John Lambert Pearson
Notre observatoire de la primaire socialiste sur le Net
Ces courbes comparent la présence des candidats sur le Net depuis le 21 juin 2011, soit une semaine avant la déclaration officielle des candidats à la primaire. Utilisez la réglette pour préciser la période d'analyse.
Ce module mesure les citations de chaque candidat dans les articles publiés au sein de l'échantillon de blogs et de médias suivi par Linkfluence. Cet échantillon se compose des 12 000 sites d'info et blogs français les plus visibles sur la Toile (ceux possédant les audiences les plus fortes mais aussi les plus cités sur le Web français). Les données sont calculées du lundi au dimanche et sont mises à jour une fois par semaine.
Security Expert: U.S. 'Leading Force' Behind Stuxnet
One year ago, German cybersecurity expert Ralph Langner announced that he had found a computer worm designed to sabotage a nuclear facility in Iran. It's called Stuxnet, and it was the most sophisticated worm Langner had ever seen.
Courtesy of Langner Communications
German cybersecurity expert Ralph Langner warns that U.S. utility companies are not yet prepared to deal with the threat presented by the Stuxnet computer worm, which he says the U.S. developed.
In the year since, Stuxnet has been analyzed as a cyber-superweapon, one so dangerous it might even harm those who created it.
In the summer of 2010, Langner and his partners went to work analyzing a malicious software program that was turning up in some equipment. Langner Communications is a small firm in Hamburg, Germany, but Langner and the two engineers with whom he works know a lot about industrial control systems. What they found in Stuxnet left them flabbergasted.
"I'm in this business for 20 years, and what we saw in the lab when analyzing Stuxnet was far beyond everything we had ever imagined," Langner says.
It was a worm that could burrow its way into an industrial control system, the kind of system used in power plants, refineries and nuclear stations. Amazingly, it ignored everything it found except the one piece of equipment it was seeking; when the worm reached its target, it would destroy it.
Langner says that the more his team analyzed the Stuxnet worm, the more they knew they were onto something big.
"We were pretty much working around the clock," he says, "because after we had the first impression of the magnitude of this, we were just like on speed or something like that. It was just impossible to go back to sleep."
Langner also realized after analyzing the Stuxnet code that it was designed to disable a particular nuclear facility in Iran. That's serious business, he figured. Some Iranian nuclear scientists, he remembered, had been mysteriously killed. Langner published his findings anyway.
I'm in this business for 20 years, and what we saw in the lab when analyzing Stuxnet was far beyond everything we had ever imagined.
"I wasn't actually scared, but this was just something I was thinking about," he says. "You know, this stuff must involve intelligence services who do some dirty work every now and then, and you can't just block that away from your personal situation when you are the guy who is the first to publish [that] this is a directed attack against the Iranian nuclear program. So there have been some frightening moments."
U.S. The Culprit?
Langner says as they dug deeper into the Stuxnet code, each new discovery left them more impressed and wondering what was coming next. He says he couldn't imagine who could have created the worm, and the level of expertise seemed almost alien. But that would be science fiction, and Stuxnet was a reality.
"Thinking about it for another minute, if it's not aliens, it's got to be the United States," he says.
The sophistication of the worm, plus the fact that the designer had inside intelligence on the Iranian facility, led Langner to conclude that the United States had developed Stuxnet, possibly with the help of Israeli intelligence.
Langner isn't shy about naming the U.S. as the Stuxnet culprit, as he stated in a recent speech at the Brookings Institution. In that speech, he also made the bigger point that having developed Stuxnet as a computer weapon, the United States has in effect introduced it into the world's cyber-arsenal.
"Cyberweapons proliferate by use, as we see in the case of Stuxnet," he said. "Several months or weeks or a year later, the code is available on the Internet for dissection by anyone who has the motivation or money to do so."
It would have to be revised, Langner says, in order to target some other industrial control system besides the one in Iran, a U.S. power plant, for example. But it could be done, and he warns that U.S. utility companies are not yet prepared to deal with the threat Stuxnet represents.
The CIA declined to comment on Langner's charge that the U.S. was "the leading force" behind Stuxnet. Homeland Security officials insist measures are being taken to defend U.S. infrastructure against cyberattack.
samedi 1 octobre 2011
IBM Tops Microsoft to Be World’s Second-Most Valuable Technology Company
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) passed Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to become the world’s second-most valuable technology company, a reflection of industry changes including the shift away from the personal computer.
IBM’s market value rose to $214 billion yesterday, while Microsoft’s fell to $213.2 billion. It’s the first time IBM has exceeded its software rival based on closing prices since 1996, according to Bloomberg data. IBM became the fourth-largest company by market value, based on yesterday’s closing price, and, in technology, trails only Apple Inc. (AAPL)
Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano sold IBM’s PC business six years ago to focus on corporate software and services. Though Microsoft has expanded into online advertising and games, it gets most of its revenue and earnings from the Windows and Office software used primarily on PCs.
“IBM went beyond technology,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. “They were early to recognize that computing was moving way beyond these boxes on our desks.”
IBM remained ahead of Microsoft for a second day today, sliding $4.30 to $174.87 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, as Microsoft dropped 56 cents to $24.89 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. IBM, based in Armonk, New York, has gained 19 percent this year, while Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, has fallen 11 percent.
Apple, which long competed against IBM and Microsoft in the PC business, passed Microsoft in market value last year, on rising sales of iPhones, iPods and iPads. Apple’s market capitalization is $353.5 billion based on today’s close.
Palmisano’s Strategy
Palmisano, who is also chairman, has spent his nine years at the helm sharpening the company’s focus on software and services for corporations and government. Once known as the world’s largest computer company, IBM in 2005 sold its PC unit to Lenovo Group Ltd. (992), calling it “commoditized.” The company has spent more than $25 billion investing in its software, computer-services and consulting businesses.
The maneuvers have helped increase per-share profit for more than 30 straight quarters. Palmisano has boosted sales by 20 percent from 2001 through last year, while keeping the costs of the 426,000-employee company little changed. IBM pulled in more than half of its $99.9 billion in revenue last year from services and is now the world’s largest computer-services provider.
The company is betting it can add another $20 billion to revenue through 2015. Palmisano is investing in emerging markets and analytics, as well as cloud-computing and an initiative called Smarter Planet to connect roads, electrical systems and other infrastructure to the Internet.
Railways, Waterways
“Computing is now found in things that no one thinks of as ‘computers’,” said Palmisano at a trade show keynote in February. “Today, there are nearly a billion transistors per human, and each one costs one ten-millionth of a cent. Yes, some of these transistors are going into servers, PCs, smart phones, MP3 players and tablets. But an increasing number of them are going into appliances and automobiles, power grids, roadways, railways and waterways.”
IBM plans to almost double operating earnings to at least $20 a share in 2015. Investors have taken notice: Shares have climbed 35 percent since the company first announced the goal in May 2010.
Microsoft’s Slump
Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, was worth three times as much as IBM in January 2000 and hit a market capitalization of more than $430 billion in July 2000, according to Bloomberg data. Microsoft fell to about $135 billion in March 2009 during the economic downturn, before recovering with the market.
Microsoft, which had $69.9 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending in June, got about 60 percent of its sales from the Windows and Office units in the most recent quarter.
“They were trapped in the classic innovator’s dilemma” because their software business was so good,” said Schadler. “The bet that Microsoft made in the PC business was to double down and double down and double down.”
CEO Steve Ballmer said investors may not appreciate the company’s progress in other businesses, including server software and online versions of Office, given the higher profile of its consumer businesses.
“People are saying, ‘Where do you go next?’,” said Ballmer at the company’s annual meeting in November. There probably isn’t “as much appreciation for the incredible growth and success we’ve had with enterprises since people relate better to the consumer market. But it’s great products with great earnings and particularly in some high-visibility categories.”
Xbox, Bing
The company’s server software and Office divisions boosted sales last quarter, as did the entertainment division, which includes its Xbox games business. Revenue at the online services division, including the Bing search engine, climbed to $662 million, while its operating loss widened to $728 million.
Microsoft also cut a deal with Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) this year to make its Windows Phone the primary operating system for the company’s smartphones. The deal is designed to help both companies compete against Apple and Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system, which is available for free to handset makers such as Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
Mobile and Cloud
IBM briefly passed Microsoft in market value rank on an intraday basis in May, and the companies may continue to switch positions, said Joel Achramowicz, an analyst for Blaylock Robert Van LLC in Oakland, California. While IBM has largely convinced investors it can execute its stable growth strategy, Microsoft has to prove it can move beyond PCs to tackle the mobile and cloud computing markets, he said.
“Right now, we’re on the cusp of a major offensive move on the part of Microsoft to position itself with some significant leadership, this time in the mobile sector,” he said. “Investors are skeptical, so the opportunity here is actually bigger for Microsoft than it is for IBM.”
Still, mobile computing is unlikely to ever be as profitable for Microsoft as the PC business, said Forrester’s Schadler.
“They’re never going to win in that business the way they did in the PC business,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Sarah Frier in New York at sfrier1@bloomberg.net; Dina Bass in Seattle at dbass2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net
vendredi 30 septembre 2011
Selling Is Not About Relationships
Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you'll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It's a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic?
To understand what sets apart this special group of sales reps, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.
We now have an answer, which we've captured in the following three insights:
1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles.
Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep's primary mode of interacting with customers:
- Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers' every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
- Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They'll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
- Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
- Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers' standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
- Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers' business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They're not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.
2. Challengers dramatically outperform the other profiles, particularly Relationship Builders.
When we look at average reps, we find a fairly even distribution across all five of these profiles. But while there may be five ways to be average, there's only one way to be a star. We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.
What makes the Challenger approach different?
The data tell us that these reps are defined by three key capabilities:
Challengers teach their customers. They focus the sales conversation not on features and benefits but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the customer's business. They come to the table with new ideas for their customers that can make money or save money — often opportunities the customer hadn't realized even existed.
Challengers tailor their sales message to the customer They have a finely tuned sense of individual customer objectives and value drivers and use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch to different types of customer stakeholders within the organization.
Challengers take control of the sale. While not aggressive, they are certainly assertive. They are comfortable with tension and are unlikely to acquiesce to every customer demand. When necessary, they can press customers a bit — not just in terms of their thinking but around things like price.
We'll discuss each of these capabilities in more depth in our upcoming posts, but just as surprising as it is that Challengers win, it's almost more eye-opening who loses. In our study, Relationship Builders come in dead last, accounting for only 7% of all high performers.
Why is this? It's certainly not because relationships no longer matter in B2B sales--that would be a naïve conclusion. Rather, what the data tell us is that it is the nature of the relationships that matter. Challengers win by pushing customers to think differently, using insight to create constructive tension in the sale. Relationship Builders, on the other hand, focus on relieving tension by giving in to the customer's every demand. Where Challengers push customers outside their comfort zone, Relationship Builders are focused on being accepted into it. They focus on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likable and generous with their time. The Relationship Builder adopts a service mentality. While the Challenger is focused on customer value, the Relationship Builder is more concerned with convenience. At the end of the day, a conversation with a Relationship Builder is probably professional, even enjoyable, but it isn't as effective because it doesn't ultimately help customers make progress against their goals.
This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win.
Here's how one of our members in the hospitality industry put it when he saw these results: "You know, this is really hard to look at. For the past 10 years, it's been our explicit strategy to hire effective Relationship Builders. After all, we're in the hospitality business. And, for a while, that approach worked well. But ever since the economy crashed, my Relationship Builders are completely lost. They can't sell a thing. And as I look at this, now I know why."
3. Challengers dominate the world of complex "solution-selling"
Given the first two findings, it might be reasonable to conclude that Challengers are the down-economy reps and that when things return to normal, Relationship Builders will once again prevail. But our data suggest that this is wishful thinking.
When we cut the data by complexity of sale — that is, separating out transactional, product-selling reps from complex, solution-selling reps — we find that Challengers absolutely dominate as selling gets more complex. Fully 54% of all star reps in a solution-selling environment are Challengers. At the same time, Relationship Builders fall off the map almost entirely, representing only 4% of high-performing reps in complex environments.
Put differently, Challengers win because they've mastered the complex sale, not because they've mastered a complex economy. Your very best sales reps — the ones who carried you through the downturn — aren't just the top performers of today but the top performers of tomorrow, as they are far better able to drive sales and deliver customer value in any kind of economic environment. For any company on a journey from selling products to selling solutions — which is a migration that more than 75% of the companies I work with say they are pursuing — the Challenger selling approach represents a dramatically improved recipe for driving top-line growth.
In the next post, we'll look at how Challengers teach their customers and how leading companies are equipping their salespeople to do the same.
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