Good article by Peter Preston today (MPs stuck in the lobbyist mire) contrasting further revelations about politicians and the Committee on Standards in Public Life

Preston concludes by contrasting MP’s behaviour with the committee’s “Seven Principles of Public Life”: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.

He goes on to say:

Expanding the rulebook to deal with every fresh scandal isn’t a sustainable approach. We have to ensure that the Seven Principles “are embedded in the culture of our public service institutions and translated into personal values, reinforced in everyday behaviour by systems and processes”.

I was struck with the the bit about embedding principles in culture and reinforcing by effective structure. To apply the ideas for our areas:

We have to ensure that “value added business development” is embedded in the culture of our organisation and translated into personal values, reinforced in everyday behaviour by systems and processes.

Our customers are busier than ever. Who has the time to listen to a salesperson or account manager going through all of the details of their products?

We must earn the opportunity to spend time with customers by adding value. This means bringing something to our customer that improves things immediately. And we’re not talking about them getting the improvements that will come if the customer buys from you. No, we need to improve things right now as part of our business development process.

How do we add value during our business development processes?

The answer is questions.

Here’s how it works. Because we work in our area of expertise all of the time we have become experts. We can choose to use our expert knowledge to ask great questions.

Of course, many of our best questions will be open: what, when, who, where, how and why.

Yes, of course we can save time by giving them the answers that are obvious to us. But that’s not the point! If we help them to work things out for themselves, they get to keep the answers. And these answers include all of the subtleties of their unique situation. The answers they work out for themselves use their own specific vocabulary.

We’ve helped them to see their circumstances from a new perspective. Ideally, we have helped them to make improvements, whether or not they choose to use us as supplier or partner. We have added value during the business development process.

Business development teams are typically required to achieve tough targets. This can make them very selfish. They go out on a mission to tell the world about their products and services. What can we do today to make sure that our business development team focuses first on adding value with great questions in order to earn the opportunity to do business?

I came across this outstanding guide to IBM Social Computing Guidelines this morning.

The guidelines caught my eye because a couple of weeks ago, a search had taken me to the website of Sacha Chua. Sacha works at IBM. I saw a reference on her website to “The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer”. I wondered at the time what might have led to the clarity of the statement.

I also noticed that Sacha’s blog archive goes back almost 10 years to 2001.

Here is somebody in their mid twenties who has already spent a decade immersed in a world of collaboration and web based networking.

As William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed”.

Here’s an interesting article from the Financial Times discussing the change from conventional business strategy to more flexible and adaptable processes.

We use PBWorks for our Real World Web Toolkits.

Here is a link to a good interview with PBWorks from the perspective of IT project management.