The ancient Chinese believe that your face reflects who you are, why you think, feel and behave the way you do. Understand the features of one’s face and you understand the person with whom you are speaking to — even before they open their mouth. Faces tell all. You can probably tell if those you know well are angry, happy, sad,hurt or tired by looking at their faces. But most people's knowledge of faces ends there. The Chinese have made a thorough study of the art of face-reading. For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese have studied the faces of everyone they met. Their art of reading faces is known as Siang Mien. It divides faces into 10 shapes which reveal the basic character traits. Forehead - Intellegence | Memory | Career | Frienship. Eyebrows - health | common sense. Eyes - Resourcefulness | Trustworthiness.  Nose - Wealth. Mouth - Reliability | Generosity. Cheeks - Power. Ears - Sexuality | Detirmination. Chinese Families in many countries practise Siang Mein without even calling it by its name. Having lived and worked in China I noticed the Chinese habit of staring. When the chinese stare it's your character that is being assessed. Only this week, KFC fast food outlets in Bejing started using facial recognition technology  to try to predict customer's orders based on age and gender. It can also make recommendations based on past visits. So, the next time you find yourself in a networking meeting, interview or social gathering, take a closer look at the person’s face that you just met. You may just learn something about them even before they utter a word. There are lots of books and YouTube videos that sales people can use to show why knowing your  customer's face is really the key to your fortune.

One of the areas that we constantly see is organisations trying to maintain a status quo with their brand and the way they communicate with their employees and their customers .

The real key for growth  is to keep experimenting, keep connecting up with new people and new organisations and become more transparent in the way they work, communicate internally and externally.
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Many organisations are still not designing their brand and their future success with the whole experience of people engaged with them. Instead they appear to be stuck in a world of logos, taglines and definitions of identities.
 
Look at brands like Airbnb and Zopa, the world’s first peer-to-peer money lending service, to consider how you can connect your customers directly to each other and have them create mutual value.
 
Building businesses without walls will provide the creativity that will replace ownership with sharing, control with creativity and replace Silos with transparency.
 
Transmitting to people the things we have created is the status quo, instead we should be providing the things that people shape themselves. This way we will stop controlling and think about the real changes we need to make. In a sense tomorrow’s high-growth businesses will be constantly experimental and completely boundary less.

Social Business : 
Building a business without walls
What is driving this new era ?
As the world becomes more interconnected and intelligent and people use social computing , today's businesses face a transformation in the way they communicate internally ,externally and in the way they work. This is becoming known as the era of Social Business.

What is a Social Business ?
A Social Business uses what we today regard as social networking tools to make a business more connected , transparent , more human , adaptive and intelligent. 

What is in the recipe to make a business social ?
There are three ingredients that are used in the the recipe for success in building a social business. The first is the ability to connect people to expertise. Whether that is customers, suppliers, distributors or employees. The second is the removal of unnecessary walls between subject matter experts within and outside of the business. The third ingredient is our old favourite, Agility.

What will this new approach achieve ?
A social business moves the focus of a business away from documents, plans and other spurious observations to the real source of creativity and decision making that will move the business forwards. By being more connected and transparent, we increase the flow of information inside and across the organisation. By creating a social business environment we increase trust with our peers and our clients.

What are the first steps we can take ?
Clearly the backbone of any Social Business has to be the integration of networks involving employees, customers, suppliers and partners. Trusted experts collaborating and forming agile approaches that allow for the creation and nurturing of ideas. Networks of like minded colleagues that form communities of common interests, that initiate actions that fulfil the real business needs. Connecting, exploring ,empowering, improving and problem solving. Using devices that are best suited to an individual's needs and keeping them connected wherever and whenever they are needed. Speed and relevance being the mantra in a world where currently we are never in a situation long enough to learn by our mistakes.

The key is Trust 
Empowering employees in any organisation needs a level of trust to be more transparent and equally it requires trust in its customers to join in maintaining an openness that often is not shown in the way we work today. This of course must be balanced by governance and discipline that is set by social agreement across the community driven by common interests.

The overall value gained by creating a Social business
Its becoming clear to everyone ,that in harnessing the full potential of a Social Business that one can generate real business value through innovation,transparency and making best use of the subject matter skills and information often hidden in organisational stove pipes, be they of a personal or technological form. Deepening relationships, Driving product and service innovation and improving efficiencies, effectiveness and economy across the ecosystem are a key outcome of building a business without walls.

David Gay 
July 2015
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/davidggay

 

Transformational Business Opportunities
Forrester Research’s Nigel Fenwick believes that there is a big opportunity:

“The next generation of market-leading organizations will digitize their enterprise model with new capabilities enabled by social technologies… moving beyond linear, process-driven organizations to create new, dynamic, networked businesses that focus on customer value. These social businesses change the competition and set new standards for how companies, governments, and non-profits deliver value.”

The world is changing, and businesses must change with it. By following these four principles, organizations have a greater chance of successfully embedding social technologies into the workplace, allowing them to take advantage of new business workflows and opportunities.

The fear of change
The fear of change is one of the most common reason for resistance to change in any environment, and this has always been the way of things. In essence fear produces anxiety and that stops one from taking any action at all and makes us resistant to change by stirring up fears of what is not known.

Often certainty is more comfortable than uncertainty. 
The fear of change that people hold can be one of the biggest barriers to organisational change. Actually, anxiety is a natural alarm system that keeps us safe and productive. But it can become a chronic mindset. When that happens, it can deaden joy and stifle creativity. 

Leaving our comfort zone is all about trust
Fear of leaving a comfort zone: like it or not we are creatures of habit. We like our routines and don't like to be faced with uncertainty. By becoming more social, more connected, more human, more transparent , we increase the flow of information inside and across the organisation thus reducing anxiety and the fear of not being in control. 

A transformation is taking place
To take this to a new level we can see that a transformation is taking place in how people interact and how relationships form and develop and this is changing the way we socialise, the way we work and the way we engage with our customers. 

Creating a business without walls 
By creating a more social business environment and breaking down the very barriers, stovepipes of information and an environment that stifles ideas and creativity , we increase trust with our peers and our clients. In a sense we are creating a business without walls. A Social Business.

What is a Social Business ?
A Social Business uses what we today regard as social networking tools to make a business more connected , transparent , more human , adaptive and intelligent. 

What will this new approach achieve ?
A social business moves the focus of a business away from documents, plans and other spurious observations to the real source of creativity and decision making that will move the business forwards. By being more connected and transparent, we increase the flow of information inside and across the organisation. By creating a social business environment we increase trust with our peers and our clients.


David Gay 
July 2015
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/davidggay