Charlene Li: Profiles in Knowledge

Originally published February 9, 2022

8 min readFeb 10, 2022

This is my 800th blog post since I started blogging on February 8, 2006. It is the 77th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Charlene specializes in disruption, digital transformation, leadership, customer experience and the future of work. She has written about social media, social business, and Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs). She is the author or co-author of six books, including Open Leadership and Groundswell. Her latest book is The Disruption Mindset.

I first heard Charlene speak at KMWorld 2009. I later invited her to give a presentation to the Deloitte Knowledge Management Community, which she graciously agreed to do.

Background

Charlene helps leaders and organizations thrive with disruption as an expert on digital transformation and leadership. Her work includes writing books, speaking, consulting, and serving on boards. She is an entrepreneur and was the founder of Altimeter, a disruptive analyst firm that was acquired in 2015 by Prophet. She was at Forrester Research for over nine years. Charlene was named one of the Top 50 Leadership Innovators by Inc, and one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company. Charlene graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received her MBA from Harvard Business School. She lives in San Francisco.

She helps leaders and their organizations in four ways:

Research and writing. Charlene shares her research and thinking through books. Books provide her an opportunity to go more deeply into specific topics. She also periodically publishes research through Altimeter. Her latest research focuses on creating disruptive transformation strategies, leadership in the digital era, changing the culture to work at the speed of digital customers.
Speaking and workshops. From conference keynotes to intimate executive gatherings, her speeches and workshops educate and identify specific actions people can take to thrive in the digital era.
Consulting projects. Charlene helps develop in-depth strategies. These range from creating a robust digital or social strategy to developing an employee engagement plan and community.
Board and advisory roles. She serves on several boards of companies seeking to create disruptive, exponential growth, advising on issues from strategy and fundraising to organization and culture.

Education

Harvard Business School — Master of Business Administration
Harvard University — AB, Social Studies

Profiles

Content

Articles

The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Media Transformation with Brian Solis

Stage 1: Planning — Listen to Learn. The goal of this first stage is to ensure that there is a strong foundation for strategy development, organizational alignment, resource development, and execution. Key tenets of this stage include listening to customers to learn about their social behavior; using pilot projects to prioritize social efforts; and using audits to assess internal readiness.
Stage 2: Presence — Stake Our Claim. Staking a claim represents a natural evolution from planning to action. As you move along the journey, your experience establishes a formal and informed presence in social media. Key tenets of this stage include leveraging social content to amplify existing marketing efforts, providing information to support post-transaction issues; and aligning metrics with departmental or functional business objectives.
Stage 3: Engagement — Dialog Deepens Relationships. When organizations move into this stage, they make a commitment where social media is no longer a nice to have but instead, is seen as a critical element in relationship building. Key tenets of this stage include participating in conversations to build communities; using engagement and influence to speed path to purchase efficiently; providing support through direct engagement, as well as between people; establishing a risk management and training discipline to shift mindsets; and fostering employee engagement through enterprise social networks.
Stage 4: Formalized — Organize for Scale. The risk of uncoordinated social initiatives is the main driver moving organizations into Stage 4, where a formalized approach focuses on three key activities: establishing an executive sponsor; creating a hub, aka a Center of Excellence (CoE); and establishing organization-wide governance. Organizations should plan for a potential CoE pitfall, however, as creating one may lead to scaling problems in the long-term.
Stage 5: Strategic — Becoming a Social Business. As organizations migrate along the maturity model, the social media initiatives gain greater visibility as they begin to have real business impact. This captures the attention of C-level executives and department heads who see the potential of social. Key tenets of this stage include integrating social into all areas of the business; garnering executive engagement; forming a steering committee; and pushing social operations out to business units.
Stage 6: Converged — Business is Social. As a result of the cross-functional and executive support, social business strategies start to weave into the fabric of an evolving organization. to move into this stage, organizations need to make a commitment to a single business strategy process; merging social with digital; creating holistic customer experiences with converged media; and developing a holistic social culture.

Making The Business Case For Enterprise Social Networks

Four Ways Enterprise Social Networks Drive Value

Despite the promise and potential for ESNs, they have only received moderate traction. The problem is that most ESN deployments to date have been treated as technology deployments with a focus on adoption and usage. A different way to think about this is that ESNs represent a new way to communicate and form relationships — and because of that, can bridge gaps that exist in terms of information sharing and decision-making processes. To better understand these use cases, we found that they boil down to four different types of gaps in the organization — tough problems that can’t be addressed by the current technology, process, or culture.

Encourage sharing. Remember how revolutionary email was? It fundamentally changed the way we communicated by reducing the cost/effort and collapsing the time frame and scaling it to include multiple recipients. Social represents a fundamental change, simply because, at its essence, it encourages sharing. The simple presence of a status update box on a page encourages people to share their thoughts, activities, and expertise.
Capture knowledge. Capturing the collective knowledge of an organization is a daunting task because it includes a wide range of facts, information, and skills gained through experience. Yet few people proactively sit down each day to document and capture their knowledge. ESNs provide an opportunity to do just that, by capturing glimpses of knowledge through profiles, activity streams, and interactions.
Enable action. Having an ESN in place means that operations and processes can begin to change as well. This happens when the day-to-day process changes because the ESN enables new relationships and behaviors that address a gap that prevented actions from being taken.
Empower employees. The last way ESNs drive value is that they empower and embolden people to speak up and join together, as well as gives them opportunities to contribute their skills and ideas.

Why No One Uses the Corporate Social Network

Leaders know they should engage with employees, especially via digital and social channels. But they don’t, and they offer a string of common excuses such as “I don’t have enough time” or “Nobody cares what I had for lunch.” More than anything else, they fear that engaging will close the power distance between them and their employees, thereby lessening their ability to command and control.

Articles by Others

Book Review: The Engaged Leader by Jeff Ross
Keynote: The Disrupted Mindset by Mary Abraham
Social Technologies by Bill Ives
Socialogy: Interview by Stowe Boyd
Insights on Building Online Communities by Preetish Panda
Social technology and Open Leadership: Part 1 and Part 2 by Simon Mainwaring
The Future Of Facebook by Bruce Rogers
Study: Enterprise social networks failing to meet expectations by Juan Carlos Perez

Social media and technologies thinker by The British Library

Individuals may fall into one or more of six overlapping categories, depending on how they tend to interact with content on social media. The categories are:

Creators. Make their own content, for example blog posts, audio and video.
Critics. Respond to others’ content and contributing to information sources, for example adding to a wiki, commenting on blogs or reviewing products.
Collectors. Collate and organize information they find online, subscribing to RSS feeds and adding tags.
Joiners. Maintain a presence online with profiles on social networks.
Spectators. Observe others’ activities online, by consuming content without contributing to it.
Inactives. Those who are connected to the internet but are non-participants in social media.

These form a ladder with creators at the top and inactives at the bottom, with those in the middle all engaging with social technologies in various ways.