Leadership and Social Media at Best Buy

I 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.