The Wall Street Journal and MIT Sloan Management Review are jointly publishing Business Insights, a series on management, marketing, training, technology adoption, performance, and other timely issues managers face in today’s workplaces. In the report published today, three articles stood out for me as must-reads:

How to Back the Right Technology

Gerard Tellis & Ashish Sood argue that when choosing which technologies to adopt, organizations are prone to three big mistakes:

• They fail to distinguish among different levels of technology, with the result that they focus too much on one level and get tripped up by changes in another level.
• They assume technological performance follows a standard path — from innovation to obsolescence. It often doesn’t.
• They fail to recognize that technological innovations shape consumers’ tastes, not mere whims.

They offer excellent advice on how to avoid these mistakes, and their best suggestion is to try multiple things at once. Don’t bet too heavily on one choice, and don’t focus too hard on making that one bet successful. The combination of hedging bets and giving each one breathing room gives people a chance to find the best uses, and grassroots adoption is much more likely to stick, and stay successful, in the long run.

The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World

Salvatore Parise, Patricia Guinan, and Bruce Weinberg offer seven principles for making the most of Web 2.0 tools to make the most of their capabilities to engage customers, foster conversations that help sell and improve products, and involve the right people inside your organization in these efforts:

Similarly, a large technology company uses several Web 2.0 tools to improve collaboration with both its business partners and consumers. Among other things, company employees have created wikis — Web sites that allow users to add, delete and edit content — to list answers to frequently asked questions about each product, and consumers have added significant contributions.

For instance, within days of the release of a new piece of software by the company, consumers spotted a problem with it and posted a way for users to deal with it. They later proposed a way to fix the problem, which the company adopted. Having those solutions available so quickly showed customers that the company was on top of problems with its products.

One principle that particularly struck me is their definition of the ideal person to guide an organization’s efforts in Web 2.0 marketing:

So who should direct a company’s forays into Web 2.0 marketing? A number of managers identified an ideal set of skills for an executive that go beyond those of a typical M.B.A. holder or tech expert. We coined the term marketing technopologist for a person who brings together strengths in marketing, technology and social interaction. A manager said, “I’d want to see someone with the usual M.B.A. consultant’s background, strong interest in psychology and sociology, and good social-networking skills throughout the organization.”

Away From the Desk…Always

David Pauleen and Brian Harmer look at how managers can effectively manage “nanobots” – their term for a new-breed of worker that’s autonomous, works remotely, and puts in non-traditional hours. These people are an emerging force that potentially huge benefits to the organizations they work for, but the challenge is in learning to recognize, enable, and manage them successfully:

For many nanobots, success is defined in highly personal terms, such as problems solved, or influence wielded as a consequence of personal credibility. To them, hours present in the office count for less than achievements. In many cases, they regard the quality of their intellectual input as their most important contribution to the company. This is particularly the case with senior-level executives, who see themselves as implicitly trusted and empowered to work with organizational resources at all times, in all places.

The advantages to organizations who successfully engage their nanobots can be significant:

They let senior management focus more on reaching goals than on how those goals are reached. As outside-the-office workers, they also can reduce some of a company’s usual overhead costs: Taken to the extreme, a business that uses only nanobots has no need for office space, or the kinds of human-resources infrastructure that companies provide for conventional employees.

I think I like the term digital nomads better than nanobots. It’s more humanizing and might do a better job reminding managers that these highly productive people they rarely see are, in fact, people and not robots!

All three articles are excellent, and well worth a few minutes of your time.