9Lenses just announced their exclusive partnership program for executive coaches. By partnering with 9Lenses, executive coaches receive unfettered access to the suite of organizational learning applications. 9Lenses’ executive coach program is designed to equip coaches with quantitative performance measurement tools.

“Executive coaches are masters at leadership development,” says CEO and Founder of 9Lenses Edwin Miller. “An executive coach can transform the entire culture of a business. Unfortunately, fewer than twenty-five percent of executive coaches ever provide quantitative data to demonstrate the impact of their services.”

9Lenses insight platform helps coaches reveal key sources of organizational dysfunction like misalignment, personality conflicts, and communication bottlenecks. In just a few hours, coaches can ascertain any organization’s top opportunities and challenges. Most importantly, 9Lenses’ secure cloud-based software applications help coaches track and quantify the evolution of their client’s organizations over time.

Consider how powerful that information becomes when placed in the hands of an executive coach. A coach is often an executive’s closest sounding board, council, and friend. With 9Lenses, that coach can help executives pinpoint actionable areas for improvement across the entire company, and track their client’s success as they flourish.

MetrixGlobal LLC recently found that the average return on executive coaching was about $7.90 for every $1 invested. Unfortunately, few coaches have tools at their disposal to demonstrate their ROI. 9Lenses’ executive coach application suite tracks the health of every part of their client’s organization and helps coaches articulate the direct and indirect improvements caused by their training efforts.

With 9Lenes, partners gain:

Top down strategy is dead, but executives still have to lead, and they do so by setting forth strategies. Those strategies control how even the most social companies behave. Strategy will always matter most, but in the social era it’s holistic rather than top-down. The most important question then, is how does the social era affect strategic planning?

Meet Social Strategy: Or Strategic Planning Gone Social

Even social businesses (e.g. KickStart, which relies on a crowdsourcing-as-service model) fail to bring social strategies into the boardroom. For most organizations, “social” means nothing more than CRM, marketing, and product feedback cycles. Few realize the exponential rewards hidden in every company’s “Social Consciousness.” That’s what social era leaders need to tap into.

Imagine a business where every employee, customer, executive, board member, and investor could share his/her perspective on the organization’s performance with the CEO before the next strategic offsite. Pretend for a moment, that the executive leadership team collaborated and strategically planned around up-to-the-second data that accurately reflected the business’s health.

Stop imagining! The age of social strategic planning is here, and it all starts by connecting every part of a business; here we say by connecting all 9Lenses. Business leaders need to find social tools that don’t just collect data, but organize it, make it meaningful. The best social tools use schemas to map and interrelate business data end-to-end, cut through the clutter, or at least organize data in a super useful way, to make insights actionable.  

Too few organizations are applying social principles like transparency, collaboration, innovation, and connected learning to strategic planning. That’s probably because it’s difficult to know how. Social technology is new, and many executives are still struggling to discern the best way to integrate new solutions.

However you chose to take on social strategy, remember, you need to listen and learn from everyone affected by you business. Your employees, customers, investors, and advisors have knowledge you need to strategize effectively. Find a way to hear “the crowd” across your entire business, and connect rather than segment the input. Now you’ve got a thousand strategists pushing information to the top in a way that enables good decisions, instead of the top dictating a strategy that a thousand innovative employees think is bunk. Or, worse, nobody knows if it is or isn’t because the business isn’t connected.

We’ve crowd sourced business strategy: check it out!  

Let me know what you think of this post, and sign up for our RSS feed because Part II: Structuring the Social Strategy is coming out soon. Don’t miss this step-by-step guide for executives who want to use social data to drive strategic planning initiatives.

Most executives I speak with intuitively understand the value of leveraging “social” business solutions. Companies that foster transparent collaboration, innovative pipelines, and passionate communities are redefining the marketplace.

Success is all about breaking down bureaucratic hierarchies, doing a few things well, and creating continuous social feedback loops. Unfortunately, “social” solutions are great, but social tools are often too unstructured, disconnected, and complex to gain traction in enterprise-level boardrooms. 

Welcome to the Social Era:

I’m borrowing the term “Social Era” from the popular Stanford lecturer Nilofer Merchant. She’s argues quite persuasively that Schumpeter and Taylor’s traditional model of strategy is dead. Traditional strategy rests on 5 key pillars that Merchant believes are incompatible with flexible, collaborative business communities: