Leadership and Social Media at Best Buy
Leadership
April 15, 2009
Mike Henry
Operations and IT Consultant
Topics
Best Buy, Innovation, Social MediaI found this video embedded in a blog post by Jeremiah Owyang (follow @jowyang on Twitter) on his Web Strategy blog. Many people around the social and technological leading edge these days champion Best Buy for their grasp of the technologies and their application for innovation.
Check out the video and my comments will be below.
Best Buy has already established their leadership in the retail marketplace. This video demonstrates their ability to 1) lead product and service innovation and 2) lead process innovation. I note two examples from the video.
Product Innovation
About 2 minutes into the video, they begin explaining the Loop Marketplace and its use for idea management related to Robb Erickson's idea about the Geek Squad Gaming Services idea. He stated that within 4 hours his idea was up, receiving comments and had even been funded. Imagine your company hosting an environment where your ideas can receive feedback and even funding from different business units in less than fiscal years! Best Buy benefits from the leadership foresight to provide an environment where people with ideas can get their ideas to "market" and the entire enterprise benefits. Often leadership requires that we take risks to enable others to succeed.
Process Innovation
The next section in the video Jeff Severts, Ron Hoffner, Todd Soller, and Dawn Keller discuss the Tag Trade the VP of Geek Squad introduced the Tag Marketplace prediction market tool. The tool allows individuals to "trade" on the future events or ideas within Best Buy. Imagine being a project manager and finding out that your project was trading 20% below where it was yesterday. You would immediately begin checking all of your stakeholders and resources to find out what's going wrong. In fact, you should know. Best Buy has implemented this tool and taken a lead in involving their employees in the success of the company's initiatives.
Take Away
These are just two examples of how Best Buy develops leaders from the ground up. Leadership takes risks, sacrifices, invests, and tries new technologies to involve followers and create advantage. Relationships are strengthened and everyone's investment receives an opportunity to be part of the solution. What better way to appreciate your people and encourage new leaders to emerge. Imagine the things you can do in your corner of the world to begin to influence your company, group or community. You'll be changing the world.
Excellent post, I love how the video highlights innovative ways to use Web2.0 to be inclusionary and involve employees! True leadership is about how we develop and support the people we are leading, your post definitely shows examples of that!
What a great gift when an employee feels they add value to the company and they believe their contribution is both respected and valued enough to find budget for it!
Thanks for sharing,
Patti
@strategicsense
SE WI Best Buy senior leadership couldn’t manage their way out of a wet paper bag. Best Buy has outsourced their HR to the point where you can’t talk to anyone who speaks English or who knows what is going on. When you do get a call from a case worker while you are breast feeding, they tell you to call the 800 number to tell you when you are available. They are too incompetent to leave you a direct number or their extension. Best Buy is a joke to work for unless you are at the corporate headquarters. I am guessing half of them don’t have a clue what the real world of retail is like.