PERF RMANCE 04 - The Performance Portal - Ernst & Young

“ Just like great farmers, their main task as coolfarmer is
to provide a nurturing environment, and let the swarm
do the work by itself.”
listening first and foremost to themselves
and to their swarm, instead of listening
to management gurus, business school
professors, and strategy consultants.
These leaders don’t just listen but immerse
themselves into their swarm. While
conventional businesses are scrambling, the
businesses of these creators are thriving.
Leaders like Oprah, Mark Zuckerberg, or
Steve Jobs are not afraid to go to the front
line every day, listening to what their swarm
has to say. When Steve Jobs started Apple,
instead of obtaining an MBA, he immersed
himself into his swarm. He first listened
to what others did in the same space,
visiting world famous Xerox Parc research
lab to learn about personal computers
and computer mice, and landing a job at
a computer company to learn even more,
until he had figured it out and was ready to
start building his own computers at Apple.
These creators also give back to their
swarm. Google famously encourages its
employees to be creative, come up with new
product ideas which are then given away
for free in some form until the company
has figured out a way of making money
from it. Google acquired picture sharing
website Picasa, set up the social networking
community Orkut, and converted a startup
into Google Docs, the web-enabled office
suite, all available free to users. When
Steve Job’s swarm of fanatic iPhone
owners complained about a new price cut,
he immediately gave back the difference
in price to anybody who had bought the
iPhone at the old, higher price.
In short, chief creative officers, other than
conventional CEOs, immerse themselves
into their swarm, they share with their
swarm, and go where their swarm wants
to go. Just like great farmers, their main
task as coolfarmer is to provide a nurturing
environment, and let the swarm do the
work by itself.
While these principles have been developed
for “real” bricks-and-mortar organizations,
they are no less valid in the virtual world,
where they allow the identification of
hidden leaders and innovators in online
social networks such as Facebook and
online forums. These leaders can then
be recruited as lead users and extended
members of a product development team.
I would now like to illustrate these concepts
by describing two case studies, based
on my actual projects, which have been
ongoing for the last few years.
Healthcare case study:
creating Collaborative
Chronic Care Networks
(C3N) by connecting online
social networks
Collaborative Chronic Care Networks (C3N)
are based on the concept of Collaborative
Innovation Networks (COINs). COINs are a
radically new concept to chronic illness care
and, while many use the web for health
information, existing health-related social
networks separate patients from providers,
despite the fact that patient-provider
interaction is key to chronic illness care.
In this project, a team of medical
researchers collaborates with patients of
a chronic disease, their family members,
their doctors and other researchers. The
goal of the project is to improve the living
conditions of people with Crohn’s disease,
also called inflammatory bowel disease
(IBD), which affects about 100,000 young
people in the United States. Toward that
goal, a small group of about 20 medical
researchers, doctors and patients works
together as a COIN. They are reaching out
to Crohn’s patients on Facebook, where
about 100,000 people are organized in
about a dozen Facebook groups (see
Figure 1). Members of these groups are
recruited as volunteers for patient data
collection, and to get advice on what works
and doesn’t for patients in their daily lives.