Many companies have historically utilized transactional-based business strategies and have

established a litany of processes to ensure their success. These companies do not encourage

innovation and choose to rely on processes as a highly controlled mechanism to address predefined

problems.

In these environments, the concept of employee ownership rarely exists and each function is simply responsible for another element of the process. An employee who transfers a call to another department is absolved from any responsibility the moment the call is transferred.

Companies operating in this framework do not trust their employees to utilize common sense, and

evaluate them almost completely on their adherence to the rules.

However, a growing number of companies have recognized the limitations and devastating consequences of this approach and have begun adapting their processes in the framework of right now business strategies.

Although process redesign and the elimination of restrictive procedures can assist organizations with the execution of a right now business strategy, their efforts cannot stop there.

Companies must reevaluate the role of their processes and recognize that processes should function only to empower employees so that they can provide customers with customized and timely experiences.

Processes should encourage employees to resolve out of the box problems, use common sense, accept greater responsibility and deliver faster problem resolutions. However, even flexible processes will never yield positive results if organizations fail to provide their employees with the ability to recognize when flexibility and out of the box thinking is warranted.

This requires that companies educate their employees on the economics of customer relationships so that they can understand crucial concepts such as life time value of the customer, customer spending habits and product margins.

Armed with the relevant information, employees will be able to apply their knowledge, customize experiences and deliver more financially impressive results.

Many organizations will never succeed at trusting their employees, placing them atop of the

organizational pyramid and adapting to the new distribution of power. CEOs and management will

often refuse to accept or utilize this shift in power.

Rather, they will revert to running their businesses according to the old rules, hoping that a few cosmetic exercises will suffice and that customers will never be the wiser.

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This is the first time a UK broadcaster has provided an on-demand streaming service for all three platforms.

Each week there will be around 250 different programmes available to watch via the iPlayer streaming service for seven days after they are first broadcast.

The streaming version of iPlayer will have new features such as the ability to share programme links, password protected access for more adult programmes and a radio button linking to BBC Radio content.

They haven’t released a linux/mac client, they’ve just made a flash website with less features than the windows client just to get the regulators off their back.

But now with video streaming the next digital times starts, Little Britain online, fantastic …

Hopefully, we all around the world get access soon to content without these requlatory and content licensing issues.

see more:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk./iplayer (UK only!)
• http://flickr.com/photos/thxberlin/2121348838/

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i found an fantastic description of Marc Andreessen (Founder of Ning – the social network and co-author of Mosaic – the browser) on hiring people:

First, drive.

I define drive as self-motivation – people who will walk right through brick walls, on their own power, without having to be asked, to achieve whatever goal is in front of them.

People with drive push and push and push and push and push until they succeed.

Second criterion: curiosity.

Curiosity is a proxy for, do you love what you do?

Anyone who loves what they do is inherently intensely curious about their field, their profession, their craft. They read about it, study it, talk to other people about it… immerse themselves in it, continuously. And work like hell to stay current in it.

Not because they have to. But because they love to. Anyone who isn’t curious doesn’t love what they do.

And you should be hiring people who love what they do. As an example, programmers.

Sit a programmer candidate for an Internet company down and ask them about the ten most interesting things happening in Internet software. REST vs SOAP, the new Facebook API, whether Ruby on Rails is scalable, what do you think of Sun’s new Java-based scripting language, Google’s widgets API, Amazon S3, etc.

If the candidate loves their field, they’ll have informed opinions on many of these topics.

That’s what you (we) want.

See also his original post: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html

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