Organisations that wish to climb the peaks of innovation (Marico comes readily to mind among Indian enterprises) need to empower their people extraordinarily at the base camp. If you share this desire and pick up Empowered with the hope of unleashing employee innovation, energising customers to queue for your products and transforming your business in general, you are likely to be disappointed. The book has little by way of principles, practices and processes that build empowerment. Nor does it deal with the inevitable resistances to greater empowerment in real-life organisations and the way to overcome them.
On the other hand, if you ignore the hype of the title and use the book to discover how the new Web technologies are changing consumer behaviour, you may actually come away with quite a few good ideas about using information technology (IT) to make a favourable impact on consumers who have a Net presence.
The fundamental argument of the book is fairly simple. Social networking and other developments in Web technology have increasingly moved the balance of power from companies to consumers. The only way to counter the cyber-potency acquired by consumers through the Web is to encourage individual employees, within the organisation, to use the same Web weapons to meet consumer needs or redress their complaints. This can only happen if employees are empowered by their managers and equipped by IT to take on such roles. Authors Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler (both of whom work for Forrester Research, an independent research company that provides technology advice to business) are at their most grounded when they are dealing with technology trends. Their observations on managing people, culture and organisational change are more remote and less practical.
Bernoff and Schadler identify four groundswell (their usage) trends that have given clout to consumers: smart mobile devices, pervasive video, cloud computing and social technology.
The authors are obviously knowledgeable in this domain. They extract interesting consumer behaviour implications from Gladwell’s “maven” and “connector” categories of trend-spreaders. The concept that, in the new marketing tunnel, influence begins after the sale leads to refreshingly new ways to break out of marketing thought-blocks. Equally seminal are the ideas the book contains for making customer service the prime vehicle for marketing in a Web-empowered world.
Yet, even in the parts where the book is at its strongest, some limitations are apparent. The fundamental premise — of the Net-active consumer affecting the fortunes of a corporate house — is limited to organisations that face a mass consumer market directly and has restricted relevance to all B2B businesses. Even for consumer-facing businesses, the arguments of this book lose their explanatory and recommendatory power to the extent consumers are not net denizens — an obvious relevance-restrictor for much of the Indian market.
What makes the prescriptions even more suspect in the Indian context is the over-reliance on a single piece of research (Forrester’s North American Technological Empowerment Online Survey, Q4 2009) which seems to have been used for teasing out most of the conclusions (12 out of the 13 figures in part two of the book are based on this single, US, online survey). But, perhaps the most worrying consequence of following the “crying baby gets the milk” approach implicitly advocated by the book, is the consequential neglect of consumers who do not have the time, inclination, temperament or social network access and language facility to make noise enough to gain a Web-attuned corporation’s attention. Even if we ignore the basic inequity of such a strategy, would we not be creating a negative feedback loop where we are conditioning customers to find ever more conspicuous ways of hurting corporate reputations as the best means of having their problems redressed?
The parts of the book that deal with the organisational transformation necessary for exploiting groundswell technology trends are less convincing and more contrived than the description of the cyber-world outside. Employees who meet the charge of Net-savvy consumers are called HEROs (for highly empowered and resourceful operatives) and, in a rather wishfully child-like view of organisational dynamics, these HEROs are expected to strike “compacts” with IT and management. The elements of the compacts range all the way from the pedestrian to the platitudinous. For instance, management pledges to “encourage experimentation to solve customer problems where needed” and employees promise to “take lessons from projects and spread them throughout the organisation”. The tools suggested by the authors are tailored from the same, simplistic swaddling cloth. We come across a device called EVE (for effort-value evaluation), which is expected to yield a score for deciding which projects to pursue. EVE’s searching questions on “cost” are indicative of the depth of the instrument:
What is the total budget?
Less than $500: 0 points
$500 to $2,000: 5 points
More than $50,000: 20 points
Does the project save money?
Decreases marketing costs:
Add 20 points
Decreases customer service costs: Add 20 points
Also Read
Does not save money: Add 0 points
If you find this useful, you should also be able to save your marriage based on the spouse attraction questionnaire score you get in Cosmopolitan.
Admittedly, all the suggestions for internal change are not equally far-fetched. When Bernoff and Schadler make suggestions about the IT function, they can provide some very useful ideas and options. It is notoriously difficult to push IT departments to support applications that make a real difference to the end-consumer. If you have such a need, the tips you get for guiding IT in new directions may well make the Rs 1,000 you spend in acquiring this book worth it.
The reviewer is CEO, Banner Global Consulting
EMPOWERED
Unleash your employees, Energize your customers, Transform your business
Josh Bernoff & Ted Schadler
Harvard Business Review Press
252 pages; Rs 995