Opening Session at LotusSphere 2011

LotusSphere 2011 kicks off this morning and, as the picture to the right notes, IBM is focused on using social business to get true business results.

In line with this new focus, Kevin Spacey, Executive Director for The Social Network, to give an opening on why “going social” matters.  You may wonder why would IBM have a Hollywood personality kick off their yearly event (I know I was).

Kevin Spacey, and his partners, discovered, roughly a decade ago, that becoming famous, becoming successful, comes with a price.  The price was that access to information, in his case scripts, became more difficult.  Walls were put up around him, to protect his time, much as walls are put around your senior leadership team to protect their valuable time.  Unfortunately, while these walls were getting higher the quality of scripts he was receiving were not improving at all. 

This problem led to a solution.  In 2001 Spacey and his partners created a new social community for script writers, well ahead of today’s well-known social networks like Facebook.  This community has grown to more than 350,000 members and has led to many successes where script writers have sold their scripts for movies and plays.  Collaboration and community solutions can be applied to many, many, problems.

One of Kevin Spacey’s mentors, Jack Lemmon, use to talk about “sending the elevator back down”, giving those that have not yet achieved the same level of success as yourself, a chance to rise up.  Whether you are working in government, private enterprise, or hollywood, you want to give your customers, both current and future, the tools for success, the tools to rise up.

Is your organization sending the elevator back down or are you simply looking out the windows, unaware of why your customers are nowhere to be found?