DAVE’S NEW BUSINESS BROCHURE

We pool our intellectual assets ñ expertise, skills, experience, networks, and leading edge thinking, tools and technologies. We bring agility, economy, efficiency, reach and depth that no limited, hierarchical professional services organization can match.

The products and services of Meeting of Minds fall into three clusters:

In contrast to the traditional model, our approach is personal and customized to the needs of each front-line worker. It extends the boundaries of your organization by allowing everyone to tap into the personal internal and external networks of everyone — to bring to bear, just-in-time, the best minds on the planet to solve your business problems, not just the information that your employees happen to have written down in case it was needed again.

Our four offerings in this Cluster are implementations of a new set of front-line focused technologies called Social Networking Applications, voted 2003ís ìTechnology of the Yearî by Business 2.0 magazine. They are:

Personal Content Management: Simple, leading-edge tools and processes that allow individuals to organize, manage, add to and share the knowledge that they have on their desktop. These tools, customized and stripped down versions of commercial ‘weblogs’, also allow this personal, organized collection of knowledge to be shared, simply and automatically, with others at the individual’s discretion, and likewise permit your front-line people to browse and subscribe to the personal knowledge collection of others, inside and outside the organization, reciprocally, worldwide. The PCM tool therefore serves as the individual’s proxy, e-filing cabinet, CV and calling card.

Expertise Location: Simple, boundaryless networking tools that allow individuals to find world-class expertise inside or outside the organization to solve large and small business problems quickly and effectively. These tools, customized versions of commercial social networking applications, can tap into PCM knowledge and the assessments of others outside the business to enrich and extend the search for expertise, automatically collect and maintain a ‘super address book’ of expertise to provide instant, multiple points of contact with identified experts, and can even be used to contract to buy from or sell to those outside the organization.

Simple Virtual Presence: Simple, professional laptop based tools that provide one-click multimedia access to anyone in each employee’s ‘super address book’, and virtual presence at any conference. Used in connection with a rotatable laptop camera and headset, these tools simultaneously show a view of the person you’re talking to, the document or presentation you’re collaborating on, and any sidebar instant messaging conversations you’re participating in.

Personal Productivity Improvement: Short, focused, pre-researched, one-on-one sessions with each of your front line people that address the specific technology and information challenges of each individual, configure their computer for optimal personal use, provide useful leave-behind reminder tips (‘cheat sheets’), and identify and report back to management systemic knowledge and technology problems that are hampering employee effectiveness on a wider scale. These sessions hone employees’ problem-solving, researching, analysis and communication, consultation, collaboration and technology use skills in the context of what they do in their individual roles, in ways that work for them.

Social Networking Applications, properly designed and implemented, are as easy to use as a telephone, and function intuitively, allowing individuals to do electronically and virtually what they now do physically, in an analogous manner, without the need for substantial training.

These products and services can be used to innovate, reinvigorate, enhance, and improve the effectiveness and value of your IT, Learning and Information/ Knowledge Management teams and processes, and enhance the productivity of everyone in your organization.

We work closely with the people at both the top and front lines of your organization to achieve these improvements. We do not reduce cost or the need for people in your organization. Instead, we enable your existing staff to do significantly more, in areas that are strategic, even critical to your businessí success, and to do so more effectively.

Meeting of Minds can help you identify which technology, information, learning and other infrastructure strategies make sense for your business, and whether, and how, to outsource. Our three offerings in this Cluster are:

Infrastructure Strategy Alignment: We help you assess alternative infrastructure strategies, bringing to bear competitive intelligence on which strategies have and haven’t worked for other companies in your industry. Then we show you which alternative strategies are most closely aligned to your short and longer term organization-wide business strategy, and help you find a migration path that will give you the infrastructure you need, where you need it, in both the near and long term.

Infrastructure Reorganization & Outsourcing: We take a look at your overall infrastructure resources and investment, and the value they provide to your business. Then, drawing on leading global practices in infrastructure organization and management, we help you determine whether, and how, reorganization of your infrastructure groups and redeployment of intellectual resources can benefit operational effectiveness. If outsourcing is a logical alternative, we work with the existing staff to help them be part of the solution — helping them set up new infrastructure specialty houses that can improve their job satisfaction while transitioning them from an employee to a supplier relationship with you.

Infrastructure Future State Visioning: At Meeting of Minds we take a long view of business change. We know that sometimes what provides short term pain creates long term pain, and that many businesses are undone not by poor business management but by failure to anticipate and adapt to unexpected innovations and environmental changes in the industry. We closely monitor what’s happening at the leading edge of intellectual capital development and management, and how today’s emerging infrastructure tools will transform the way business is done tomorrow. Future State Visioning can provide you with a dynamic scan of the horizons of your business and industry, and allow you to anticipate and capitalize on future trends, and stay on your industry’s leading edge.

1. Are you aware of, and satisfied with, the return your business is getting on its investment in information, technology and learning?

2. Do you know what the prevailing ‘information behaviour’ of your front-line people is — how they use information, where they look for it, what sources they trust, and how they learn?

3. Are your people able to effectively use the technology and information that is available on their laptops/desktops — can they find what they need quickly, reliably and efficiently?

4. Do your people travel only when other effective means of communication, meeting and collaboration are unavailable — do they even have these alternatives at their disposal and are they comfortable and effective using them?

5. Are you, and your senior IT and KM people, aware of the existence of, and potential value of, Social Networking Applications, and why Business 2.0 magazine called them 2003’s Technology of the Year, and why some people think Social Networking will be the successor to Knowledge Management?

6. Do you know the pros and cons of central vs decentralized vs outsourced models of infrastructure management — technology, knowledge and learning — and are you confident your company has it right?

7. Do you know how much of your revenue is coming from new and innovative products vs. incremental and ‘sequel’ products, and is it substantial enough to achieve your revenue goals even in the face of new competitive price pressures?

8. Are your best and most creative people happy, fulfilled, charged up about their jobs?

9. Do you really understand how the producer-customer relationship has shifted in unprecedented and inexorable ways in the past decade, and how your business should adapt or even reinvent itself around a new relationship with customers?

10. Are you on top of the latest techniques in business management — viral marketing, working capital outsourcing, scenario building — and are you using them effectively to help your business succeed?

The New Business Incubator: Your most creative people are also likely your most entrepreneurial and least risk-averse. Taking a page from some of the world’s most innovative companies, we can help you set these people up in their own new business incubator, and set them free to do what they do best. We’ll teach them the basics of entrepreneurial business management — a program we call Entrepreneurship 101 — and work with you to set them up in a separate autonomous business, where they set the rules, they decide on priorities, they source and manage their own budget, they take all the risks, and you are their #1 customer.

The Innovation Amplifier: Drawing on our knowledge of how innovation succeeds in different business environments, we can assess your existing innovation processes and your ‘innovation culture’, and help you introduce proven techniques and methods that will give you a better ‘environmental scan’ of emerging trends and technologies that could have application in your business, better connectivity with your most future-astute customers, skill in ‘thinking customers ahead’ to assess the commercial value of new ideas, an ability to ‘fail early’ to cut the costs of unsuccessful innovation, and the competence to commercialize and implement innovative products, services, processes and technologies effectively.

Economic Scenario Builder: Using a variety of financial forecasting and sensitivity models, the Economic Scenario Builder can answer your ‘what if’ questions about the impact on your business of sudden changes in interest rates, unemployment rates, currencies, tax rates, GDP growth rates, trade, social and environmental laws and regulations.

The Customer Handshake: The latest innovation in Customer Relationship Management is a very old idea: build your contract with customers on trust, transparency, and a simple ‘handshake’ commitment to mutual satisfaction. The concept uses simple-language agreements and tools that replace today’s adversarial relationship with customers with a collaborative, ‘win-win’ relationship of respect and compromise.

Working Capital Monitor: Inability to properly manage cash, receivables, payables and inventories is the #1 cause of business failure. The Working Capital Monitor is a tool for forecasting and optimizing levels of each of these assets.

Viral Marketing Toolkit: Capitalizing on the explosion of connectivity and information in today’s consumer society, and new knowledge of how ideas are propagated and catch hold, one person at a time, the Viral Marketing Toolkit shows you how to promote your products and services without coercive and expensive advertising.

Each of our members has unique, deep and exceptional business skills and experience. As an example, here are some of the credentials of Dave Pollard, the partnership’s founder:

• Thirty years of business experience
• Ten years as Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young in Canada, and as their Global Director of Knowledge Innovation
• Director of the Center for Business Knowledge, the world’s largest and most award-winning centrally managed knowledge organization
• Core Member of Ernst & Young’s Innovation Team and author of the firm’s Idea eXchange innovation database
• Fifteen years advising entrepreneurial businesses on all aspects of business success — financial and operations management, start-up, forms of business organization, financing, acquisitions & divestitures, IPOs, process improvement, technology and general business advisory services
• Author of many published articles, presentations, book chapters and speeches on social networking, knowledge management, innovation, the virtual workplace, and the future of business
• Author of Canada’s highest-rated business weblog