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

by Josh Bernoff, Ted Schadler Narrated by Josh Bernoff

Overview

is your company empowered for success? You know it's happening within your organization. Your people-using low-cost, accessible technology-are connecting with customers and building innovative new solutions. But who are these creative problem solvers? How can you lead them? How can you be one? 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-often overmatching your team. In Empowered, Forrester's Josh Bernoff- coauthor of the pioneering book Groundswell- and Ted Schadler explain how to transform your company by unleashing the force of HEROes. Like John Bernier and Ben Hedrington at Best Buy, who built an army of twenty-five hundred tweeting employees to reach out to customers online. or John Stadick, who equipped six hundred sales staffers with iPhones and boosted profits at his construction rental company. The truth is, a third of your information workers already use commonly available 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 employees, company managers, and IT: HEROes build new solutions to meet customer needs, management sets clear rules while encouraging 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 percent of customers who account for 80 percent of online influence ¿ The HERO index: a scorecard of the industries and departments with the most- and the fewest-HEROes ¿ The game plan for IT's new role as a key partner in technology empowerment throughout the company ¿ Dozens of case studies and examples from firms in every industry, from retail to business services With an arsenal of 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"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

Library Journal

Two vice presidents at Forrester Research (Bernoff is also the coauthor of Groundswell) offer a rare thing: a book about using new technologies that actually goes beyond jargon and offers practical solutions. In addition to providing examples of how today's consumers have empowered themselves through social software, the authors suggest that the best way to deal with such customers is to train and support empowered workers (or HEROes, "highly empowered and resource operatives"). The most valuable part of the book is its second half, which describes how HERO employees, management, and IT staff can and must collaborate to make the system work. The focus on the whole organization makes this a good read for employees and managers alike.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170375318
Publisher:	Ascent Audio
Publication date:	09/13/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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