Helps Busy Executives to Tap Growing Online Professional Network
 March 18, 2007, Chicago, USA—Today, The Global Human Capital Journal released its Review and The Unofficial LinkedIn User”s Guide to aid executives and professionals to mine the hidden value of the rapidly growing website. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn is a leading “social” network site for managing business relationships. It currently has over nine million global members who collaborate for professional purposes.
LinkedIn represents a transformation opportunity for the Global Human Capital Journal”s executive readership. Business and government leaders can significantly increase their ability to execute strategy by leveraging emerging peer to peer knowledge networks. Notably, an executive”s LinkedIn network is beholden to no employer and can increase mobility.
However, online social networks represent a new social milieu. Most executives interviewed by the GHCJ showed a clear mental gap in understanding the potential of online professional networks. Interviewees included LinkedIn members and nonmembers.
GHCJ Chief Editor Christopher Rollyson, a known networker in high tech and corporate circles, explained the motivation for the project:
“I saw a disconnect between LinkedIn and some of the people who would benefit most by using it—corporate executives and […]
![Payment Processor Wins Web 0.2 Citation for Delivering "Yechsperience" [customer experience satire]](http://rollyson.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/webdot2-logo.png) Achieves Payor of Last Resort Status
Chicago, 13 March 2007—Today, the Global Human Capital Journal awarded StaySmall, the global payment intermediary, the odious Web 0.2 Citation for inducing a poignant bout of customer yechsperience™.
As readers know, the GHCJ exercises stringent criteria before conferring the Web 0.2 Citation: to earn it, companies must induce prolonged feelings of frustration, confusion and anguish in customers more effectively than their competitors.
Tonight, StaySmall delivered in spades, as reported by the judges. Here is a summarized account of the findings…
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An Excellent Primer for the Core Competency of the 21st Century
 To thrive in the Knowledge Economy, companies will have to learn how to innovate at warp speed, or they will simply slip beneath the surface of the water like stricken liners. Ultra low costs and exceptional quality feature sets are merely expected, and they no longer differentiate.
Conventional wisdom holds that “innovation” cycles reappear every five years, when companies have exhausted the then-current cost-cutting approaches and need to focus on driving the top line.
However, the Knowledge Economy doesn’t call for your father’s innovation. The 21st century kind will require that companies turn themselves inside-out. Winners will learn to engage and catalyze their customers’ creativity. As author Patty Seybold aptly puts it, “Companies with the smartest customers win.” Outside Innovation is an in-the-trenches manual for evolving your company to embrace the innovation imperative.
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 Two recent articles show that even the most intractable problems can be overcome when organizations find ways to align their goals. Sometimes collaboration makes for strange bedfellows—like the military and environmentalists—but opportunity is often highest when when “mashing up” groups that are not used to working together. Innovation can produce surprising value when leaders open their minds, challenge conventional wisdom and make unthinkable changes—like paying a hospital more for treating patients less.
These stories are as inspiring as they are instructive because the people involved questioned assumptions, and I hope you enjoy them.
Healthcare Costs Hit in Solar Plexus
Virginia Mason Medical Center is Seattle’s third largest health care provider, and it began innovating in several areas after receiving a wake-up call from Aetna, one of the area’s largest insurers. In 2004, Aetna shared the results of a study that compared treatment costs of Seattle area hospitals. Several of Virginia Mason’s specialty practices were significantly more costly than alternatives, and Aetna was considering excluding those areas from coverage. In the ensuing two years, Virginia Mason innovated by using new workflow strategies in targeted treatment areas. For example:
In the spine clinic, […]
 Chinese Prescription for Healthcare Providers predicts that China is showing itself to be very innovative in health care by implementing market-based offerings. The TEDA International Cardiovascular Hospital, just outside Beijing, offers six levels of service, ranging from $6.70 to $3,200 per night, as reported in “Hospital Caters to China’s Wealthy and Poor” in The Wall Street Journal or the hospital website. The lowest class of service has patients sharing a small room with other patients while “first class” includes a suite with a private gym, a garden, massage chair and other amenities.
China has an aging population of 1.3 billion to whom the government is struggling to provide health care. It regulates the prices of medicine and subsidizes basic services at public hospitals, but most people do not have western-type insurance and end up paying a major portion of their health care. The stakes are high today to solve the health care problem, and they are getting higher as the population ages.
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High Potential for Business Innovation
 Plus ça change* was the theme of The Executives’ Club of Chicago High Technology Conference December eighth, where an esteemed panel gave varying perspectives on Chicago’s importance as a technology center. William Avery of Brunswick Corporation, James O’Connor, Jr. of Motorola, Inc. and Ira H. Cohen of Goldman, Sachs & Co. spoke about technology from enterprise IT, mobile technology and investment points of view respectively. Prior to their prepared remarks, John Gentry of CSC Consulting outlined key results of the forthcoming Chicago Technology Outlook Survey, in which corporate technology leaders commented on IT trends for 2007 as well as Chicago’s role as a technology center. He moderated the panel during a Q&A session.
The net-net: Chicago has a way to go before it becomes a preeminent technology center; however, its best chance for creating breakaway value through innovation will lie in not focusing on technology, as explained in Analysis and Conclusions.
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Advice from three successful CIOs
 In the past 15 years, “enterprise IT” has been transformed from an accounting support function to the driver-enabler for innovation and value creation. By no means has this been a smooth transformation, as businesses in all industries are besieged by globalization, new competitors and rampant commoditization. At many companies, executives around the boardroom table have had mixed feelings about IT in the face of huge expenditures and uncertain ROIs.
At the Executives’ Club of Chicago High Technology Conference last week, Michael S. Carlin of Hospira, Richard Shellito of State Farm Insurance and Randy G. Burdick of OfficeMax shared their advice on keeping IT relevant in the boardroom. After their prepared remarks, Winifred A. Gillen of Capgemini moderated the panel during a Q&A session.
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Part of the IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest Report
 The Williams Companies is a Fortune 200 energy company that currently distributes 12% of all the natural gas consumed in the United States and is a major employer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Marcia MacLeod, Vice President of Business Process Outsourcing, and Karen Caldwell, Director for Energy & Utilities at IBM, explained how the company pulled a Houdini in the early 2000s, using outsourcing to survive a near-death experience in which its stock dropped from $48 to less than one dollar. This case reflected outsourcing’s potential in dramatic turnaround situations while confronting some outmoded stereotypes about its impact on local employment.
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Part of the IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest Report
IDC analysts Brian Bingham and Barry Rubenstein cited extensive IDC research to describe how outsourcing is developing as a business practice. Although they didn’t explicitly delve into adoption itself, their treatment of ITO (IT outsourcing) and BPO (business process outsourcing) provided significant insight into how outsourcing is being adopted by global enterprises. ITO is several years ahead of BPO for several reasons, namely that IT has traditionally been managed as a support function and cost center in most enterprises and, as such, it has been a textbook candidate for outsourcing. BPO is often more intertwined with the business’s core competencies; in addition, it almost always requires sophisticated IT support. Clearly, ITO had well publicized failures in the early 2000s, but this proved to be part of the normal learning curve, and ITO successes have emboldened buyers and providers to push further into the business. This contrast between ITO and BPO patterns is particularly instructive.
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Insight about Human Resources in China featured speakers with decades of experience on the ground in China and offered surprising experiences. The GSB (Booth) International Round Table hosted two Asia and cross-cultural experts 16 February 2006 at Gleacher Center, “Human Resource Challenges for Multinational Corporations in China.” As is my custom, I will summarize the salient facts of the session first, which will be followed by my analysis.
This discussion was led by Deborah Lauer, former VP Global Talent Supply at Motorola who spent six years in China, and Jeffrey Reed, a 20 year veteran of Asia who headed up Unilever-Best Foods joint ventures in Pakistan and China. The talk focused on MNCs’ (multinational corporations) human resource challenges in China, both from expatriate and local talent perspectives. Many of the ideas presented corresponded to the ITA Round Table led by Dr. Wolfgang Fürniß (see China: The New Economy).
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