Corporate Strategy Expert Christopher Rollyson Unveils Transformation Vision & Opportunity for CMOs

Jan. 6, 2008 - PRLog -- Chicago, IL  -- Today, visionary strategy consultant Christopher Rollyson published his awaited "Year in Review—2007: A Slow Boil Overture to Pervasive Social Transformation" in the Global Human Capital Journal, the online strategy journal for CEOs, CMOs and CIOs.  Having advised enterprises and startups for twenty years as a consultant and executive, Rollyson foresees the technology-led Internet and telecoms revolution morphing into a global social transformation that will emerge in 2008.

"In 2007 it became clear that we were entering a profound social transformation that would produce an unimaginable degree of change," he remarked.  "Look for disruption in all areas affected by how people connect, communicate, purchase and collaborate: business, politics, community and leisure."

Conclusions based on several threads

Everyday individuals use social networks to connect and collaborate based on any passion or whim, not physical proximity.  They create knowledge and mobilize for action very quickly.  The diminishing significance of geography renders globalization banal and in the purview of anyone.  This adds dynamism and unpredictability.

"Enterprise 2.0" emerged right on schedule in 2007.  Rollyson sees a very predictable adoption of social technologies by corporations beginning in 2008.  Executive adoption of LinkedIn and Facebook ramped strongly in 2007.  This means that executives, as B2B customers, will begin demanding social network functionality from their business partners.  This parallels the long-recognized pattern of B2C e-commerce having precipitated B2B e-business during "Web 1.0," which Rollyson now terms the 1994-2001 period.

Innovation is getting a 21st century makeover, which will emerge in 2008-2012.  "During the Industrial Economy, executives innovated as little as possible because they were focused on creating value through scale and efficiency," he observed.  "Innovation was the specialist place kicker on the team.  However, in the Knowledge Economy, it's the linebacker."

Through their increasingly pervasive connections, customers discover and consume novelty very quickly, and companies need to innovate constantly to engage them.  The problem is, companies aren't very good at innovation because it's always been practiced sporadically.  The solution?  He predicts that companies will increasingly go to their customers to help innovate in all aspects of creating, distributing, selling and servicing their offerings.

With many contacts in Silicon Valley, Rollyson has followed "green innovation" there for the past few years, but it went positively mainstream in 2007, driven by two threads: 1) increasing wealth is exploding demand for natural resources, which is serving to drive up costs to almost unprecedented levels and 2) the carbon issue appears even more intractable and disruptive.  These drivers resonate with each other and will produce strong, persistent demand for innovations that change the rules for humans' impact on the earth.

A call to action for chief marketers and advertisers

More than any other corporate competency, marketing is concerned with understanding and communicating with customers, so CMOs and their agencies will get first crack at responding to customers' changing expectations.  However, marketers and agencies must confront their legacy thinking about customer and company roles in communication.  It turns out that customers prefer to learn from each other in many cases.  Study after study shows that they often trust a group of strangers in a social network more than company representatives and experts.  This puts CMOs in a rare situation, according to Rollyson:

"Web 2.0 and social networks completely change the context of marketing because they digitize and actualize word of mouth marketing for the first time.  The marketing function is steadily becoming a shadow of its former self, but marketers that understand the dynamics will produce unprecedented value, while those that can't morph will increasingly struggle."

Read the report in the Global Human Capital Journal

Access the report, "Year in Review—2007: A Slow Boil Overture to Pervasive Social Transformation," online: http://globalhumancapital.org/archives/199-Year-in-Review...

About CSRA Inc.

CSRA is a strategy consultancy specializing in enterprise innovation and consumer empowerment.  CSRA helps Fortune 1000 enterprises transform front-end processes through customer-led innovation using Web 2.0 and social networks.  Principal Christopher S. Rollyson has twenty years of experience advising global enterprises on adopting such game-changing innovations as Java, e-business transformation, service-oriented architecture and Web services.  For more information, please visit http://rollyson.net

About The Global Human Capital Journal

The Global Human Capital Journal addresses the global shift from the Industrial Economy to the Knowledge Economy, which is changing how human beings work and deliver value. In the Industrial Economy, products encapsulated the value of human work; in the Knowledge Economy, information produces the lion's share of value, and customer experience itself is the focus of commerce and government. A greater degree of collaboration among people of the world is possible than ever before, and increased interaction will bring unprecedented surprise and opportunity, especially because the potential is great to "level the playing field" among people of the world. Obviously, these developments hold significant ramifications for business and organizational strategy.

Global Human Capital covers two prongs of economic transformation: 1) strategically, how organizations can rejuvenate their relationships with customers and constituents by collaborating with them to drive innovation and 2) operationally, how organizations can build strong collaborative cultures and skills to engage the world's emergent network of expertise, both within and without their walls. We analyze how global sourcing and collaboration are transforming enterprise and government organizations, as they transition from relatively self-contained, closed entities to more networked, open organizations.

Current categories (threads) are: Beyond Sourcing; China, India and Globalization; Economy; Innovation/Web 2.0; Technology/Leaders; and The Enterprise. Please visit us at http://globalhumancapital.org

Website: www.rollyson.net