Business Secrets of CEOs

[Mei Lin Low (MeiLin_Low)]

If you’ve seen one of the more recent videos from Polycom, entitled The Secret, you would have had a glimpse into the slick, seamless world of a high-powered executive as he powers through meetings in New York, Paris and Sao Paulo, all within the same day, yet managing to leave the office before dark. What you see in the video is a demonstration that executives can indeed “have it all”. 

Of course, it’s a video created by Marketing, highlighting the benefits of video collaboration for the busy C-suite executive. But the fact that it’s a marketing video doesn’t make it any less true. The benefits are very real: forward-looking executives have been relying on video collaboration solutions like Polycom’s for years.

Polycom’s customers know this well. Collaboration doesn’t just support the needs and day-to-day operations of the C-suite. The real secret is having video collaboration permeate every team and every single employee’s daily life; and only by making it a digital work habit throughout the organisation can CEOs (and shareholders) truly reap the benefits of collaboration. Gone is the hierarchical model of old, where video conferencing solutions were only for the Board, the CEO or MDs. It’s about ‘power to the people’ now; effective and efficient collaboration allows organisations to fully realise the value of its human capital, regardless of geography.

There are different types of collaboration, namely informative, evaluative and generative collaboration. Informative collaboration is as the term suggests – individuals working together to share information or updates. This could be project management meetings, or from a CEO’s perspective, town hall or all-hands meetings. Evaluative collaboration is also an appropriate moniker where individuals work together, potentially exchanging information but primarily in order for a judgment or a decision to be made. And lastly generative collaboration, where individuals work in tandem to create something; could be an idea, a blueprint, a new innovation and so on. 

Technological innovations such as HD video quality, bandwidth compression, video encryption and advanced content-sharing capabilities, have progressed to enable the different types of collaboration to occur naturally. For instance, annotating on a whiteboard during a brainstorm session can take place between participants in Mumbai, New York and London as easily as if they were in the same room (without the physical scuffle for the marker!). These innovations also address engagement concerns in video collaboration meetings. Now, voice triangulation algorithms can detect the location of an active speaker within a room and zoom in on him or her as the central speaker, whereas before, teams had to settle for listening to an anonymous voice emerging from a large meeting room.

More and more CEOs are leveraging video collaboration for themselves and their organisations to remove boundaries amongst employees and enable natural, easy collaboration to occur. By equipping employees with collaboration technology, physical teams in the workplace can connect with virtual members - distributed teams, remote workers and even contract or freelance employees in an instant, to share information, solve problems and generate ideas. This unleashes tangible value from within your business by empowering the most vital asset within the organisation – its people.

For more on how CEOs can elevate their organisations by leveraging collaboration technology, check out:

10 ways CEOs can build competitive advantage by investing in collaboration tech (Part 1 & 2).

This blog is part of a series of 25 blogs that take a look at how Polycom has transformed industries and business functions.

These blogs are a variety of retrospective, current and visionary perspectives with the common thread of unleashing the power of human collaboration. Follow the hashtag #Polycom25 on Twitter for tweets about this significant anniversary in our history.