Wow. I’d like to extend a huge thank you to Charlene Li for today’s spectacular webinar.  She not only discussed her book “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead”, but also shared some of her favorite examples of open organizations, defined steps to help every company determine how to open up their own businesses, and answered some hard-hitting questions from webinar participants.

We’ve summarized some of the key points below, and have also included a link to the recording. Sit back with a cup of coffee and enjoy!

• Charlene prefaced the discussion by explaining that after Groundswell was released, people routinely kept asking the same few questions over and over again – namely, “How open do I really need to be?” and “How can I manage the feeling of being out of control?”
• The definition of an open leader is one who “has the confidence and the humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.” That’s powerful stuff and has very real repercussions for organizational structures and internal communication channels, not to mention the external activities!
• Charlene reviewed socialgraphics, a new way of understanding how people are interacting with each other, who they’re influencing, and who is influencing them.
• One of my favorite parts of this webinar was when Charlene shared stories about companies like Starbucks, Best Buy, John Deere and Edelman – these companies are all embracing open leadership principles and are integrating these strategies into their business practices.
• Moving into brass tacks, Charlene outlined steps to start your organization on the path of becoming more open, including smart strategies, understood boundaries, tips on how to discover open leaders within your existing organization, and how to prepare your organization to embrace failure instead of running from it.
• One of the most interesting points brought up was the concept of a new way of thinking about how to calculate the lifetime value of a customer, which brings up the ever-popular question: “What is the value of a relationship?”.

Click here to listen and watch the webinar.

Because the file size is fairly large, it’s going to remain hosted on our Web events site. To listen, click on the link above, then navigate to and click on the upper-right-hand tab that says “View Event Recordings”. Click the playback button to the far right and you’re good to go. Take a listen and let us know what you think!