Want the Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0 application you’re passionate about to gain traction in your business? Convince the “Empty Quarter” to use it. It’s going to be a hard sell, but these folks are the ones with deep operational experience and huge corporate knowledge of your business. They are absolutely the ones you want and need to have on your ride.
Dr Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School has published a short piece on the Empty Quarter which should be compulsory reading for all us geeky, early adopter types. Not understanding that the people we’re missing exist, or how they think is a big part of why our projects fail so often.
Alex Barnett raised my awareness of Dr McAfee’s piece over at his blog where he discusses the Empty Quarter and goes on to frame further discussion in terms of Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers (which sounds very Tipping Point to me - BTW read the book, it’s excellent), and the notion of driving cultural change (I seem to be on quite the theme today).
[…] Dr Andrew McAfee comes to the party again (see my recent post The Empty Quarter… for discussion on more of his work) with his latest discussion Now THAT’s What I’m Talking About!. […]
[…] I’ve posted previously about Professor Andrew McAfee from the Harvard Business School (here and here), and his always interesting and insightful commentary on the penetration of social software technology into the business world. He coined the term “enterprise 2.0″. […]